Things You Might Not Know About Fuller House Star Jodie Sweetin
Published on November 30, 2016. Updated January 17, 2020Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Jodie was one of the biggest stars on television. She was blonde, adorable and always nailed her lines. Unfortunately, once Full House ended, she wasn’t able to parlay that talent into more successful acting roles – until now. She’s currently starring in the Netflix revival of Full House, Fuller House, and she’s back on top of the world. The show’s coming back for a third season, so get to know Sweetin better with these 10 things you didn’t know about her:
10. Adopted
Jodie Lee-Ann Sweetin was born in Los Angeles, California on January 19, 1982. Her biological parents were both in prison at the time, so her uncle, Sam Sweetin, and his second wife, Janice, adopted her when she was nine months old. The adoption wasn’t formalized, however, until she was two years old. According to Sweetin, her biological parents struggled with addiction and her mother would often leave her to go party.
9. Getting Started
Her adoptive mother decided to get Sweetin into acting after she stole the show at a nursery school recital. “While other kids were terrified on stage, I was smiling, loving every minute of the attention, owning the audience. I thrived on the attention, the spotlight,” the actress wrote in her memoir Unsweetined. “By the age of four I could read and memorize lines and I was constantly performing.” The first role she landed was in an Oscar Mayer Hot Dog commercial.
8. Full House Audition
According to the former child star, she never had to audition for the role of Stephanie Tanner on Full House. “I actually didn’t audition for ‘Full House.’ I did an episode of another Miller-Boyett show called “Valerie” and I played the next door neighbor’s niece Pamela Pool,” she said. “They had ‘Full House’ in development at the time and thought I would be perfect for Stephanie and that’s how I got cast.”
Source: Digital Spy7. Skipped a Grade
Sweetin learned to read when she was four and so she skipped kindergarten. Her teachers wanted her to skip grade one too because she was reading at a grade five/six level, but her adopted mother put a stop to it because she felt that Jodie would feel too out of place.
Source: PopSugar6. University
After high school, Sweetin went to Chapman University, which is located in Orange, California, on a scholarship. Instead of attending classes though, she partied a lot and ended up earning a .9 grad point average, which cost Sweetin her scholarship. She took some time off and went back home to regroup, but ended up going back and earned a Liberal Arts degree.
Everett Collection5. Addiction
After Full House ended and Jodie’s career began fizzling, she got into drinking. She had her first drink at the age of 14. “I probably had two bottles of wine, and I was only 14. That first drink gave me the self-confidence I had been searching for my whole life. But that set the pattern of the kind of drinking that I would do,” she told Redbook. At 15, she began experimenting with marijuana and then graduated to harder drugs like cocaine and ecstasy and then meth. Her meth use became a daily habit and landed her in rehab. Her struggles with addiction have continued since and she’s been back to rehab as well; however, she is currently clean and sober.
s_bukley / Shutterstock.com4. Relationships
She’s been married three times. She married her first husband, Los Angeles Police officer Shaun Holguin, in 2002 when she was 20, but they divorced in 2006 after he discovered that she was a meth addict. In 2007, she married Cody Herpin after dating for only a few months. They have one daughter together, Zoie. They separated just over a year after they were married and were formally divorced in 2010. That same year, she had a child with her boyfriend, Morty Coyle. They welcomed their daughter, Beatrix, in 2010, and they were married in 2012. A year later, Jodie filed for legal separation from Coyle. As of 2016, she’s engaged to Justin Hodak who, like her, is a recovering addict.
Photo by Eric Charbonneau/REX/Shutterstock3. Working in a Recovery Centre
Before Netflix launched the Full House revival series Fuller House, the former child star got a job as a clinical logistics coordinator at a drug and alcohol treatment center. During her divorce from her third husband, Morty Coyle, she even stayed at the facility while she sorted out her living situation.
Joe Seer / Shutterstock.com2. Teased
As a kid on a popular sitcom, the Fuller House star was teased at school. She also had to leave school for about three weeks out of every month during the school year, so she never had a chance to bond with the other kids. Getting picked on eventually got on her nerves and during one incident she threw a chair at another student for making fun of her. In her memoir, she revealed that there were more incidents like this, which eventually led to her having no friends at school.
Source: Jodie Sweetin Fan Club1. Conflict with Candace
As children on the Full House set, Jodie and Candace Cameron didn’t get along especially well because Candace was a few years older than Jodie and often acted like she was “too cool” to hang out with her. This really hurt Jodie’s feelings so, to get back at her, she once wrote something mean about Candace on the back wall of the living-room set in a black sharpie. She denied doing it, but it was pretty obvious it was her cause the Olsen twins were too young to write. Eventually, Jodie and Candace did become close. Candace was Jodie’s maid of honor at her wedding and her daughter was a flower girl.
Vicki L. Miller / Shutterstock.com