Susan Olsen didn’t like dumbing herself down on “The Brady Bunch.”
The actress, 63, appeared on “The Real Brady Bros” podcast hosted by her TV brothers Barry Williams and Christopher Knight final week and appeared again on the affect of her position because the ditzy Cindy Brady.
Williams informed Olsen that she was “the cutest person in the world” whereas portraying the youngest Brady sibling, earlier than explaining that he and Knight, 67, knew she “was a little bit uncomfortable with the nature” of her character.
“You’re so much smarter than your character. You’re so much edgier than your character,” Williams, 70, mentioned to Olsen. “You’re the least like Cindy. Your personality is the least like their character than any of us.”
The group mentioned a scene from the 1969 pilot episode of the sitcom the place matriarch Carol Brady (Florence Henderson) tells her daughters she feels butterflies, to which Cindy replies, “Are you sleeping with your mouth open, mommy?”
“Here it is right there. You’re saying the most idiotic thing imaginable,” Williams mentioned of Olsen’s TV second.
He then jokingly known as Cindy “stupid,” as Olsen defined, “That’s just how my career was. And it was something I had to accept. And it was really emphasized when my son was old enough to start watching the things I was in.”
Olsen recalled the time her son, Michael, watched a Disney film the place Olsen’s character didn’t know what being British meant.
“And my son said, ‘So you always play the stupid child.’ And I said, ‘Mike, you’re right. I did.’ And he goes, ‘Wow. Do you think you had anything to do with that?’ I’m like, ‘Well, I hope not!’” the actress recalled.
“But my mother always said, ‘It’s cute,’” she added.
Olsen quipped: “She doesn’t have a functioning brain, but she’s cute.”
The actress performed Cindy for the sitcom’s full run from 1969 to 1974.
She defined on the podcast how enjoying Cindy as a toddler affected her in actual life.
“We went back to regular public school. And I used to think, ‘Thank goodness the show is on a Friday because at least the kids have a whole weekend to maybe forget about all the stupid things Cindy did while she was in my body on TV,’” she mentioned.
Olsen added: “I knew every year I’d have a whole new crop of kids that had just arrived in the neighborhood who were going to treat me like I was a freak in a sideshow. But my friends were really good.”
Later within the podcast, Olsen revealed she acquired injured and “almost died” filming the primary episode of the sequence.
“I was getting body makeup on my legs. Was standing on a makeup chair and something from the catwalk, where they keep all the lights and everything, fell,” she defined. “It hit the makeup man first, [bounced] off the body makeup woman and hit me in the face.”
Olsen joked that she needs she had sued Paramount for the incident “because I would have made more off of that than the show.”
