‘Family Matters’ Star Jo Marie Payton Alleges Jaleel White Tried to Fight Her While on Set

Family Matters actress Jo Marie Payton alleges she and co-star Jaleel White nearly got into an on-set change during the filming of the show’s ninth season.

Payton, who played matriarch Harriette Winslow during the show’s nearly decade-long run, told Entertainment Tonight that “there was one time he actually wanted to physically fight me,” referring to White, who played the show’s instantly recognizable breakout character, Steve Urkel, the Winslows’ next-door neighbor.

Payton, who said White “didn’t have the etiquette” on set that she and some other actors may have had, alleges that the incident took place while they were filming the 10th episode of season nine, “Original Gangsta Dawg.”
“There was something that he wanted to do and I said we can’t do that, standards and practices will not let that pass. It’s not gonna happen. He wanted to do it anyway,” she said. “He was so mad, he started kicking and screaming and stuff.”

That’s when, Payton said, she walked off, but as she was doing so, she heard White make a remark; she asked co-star Darius McCrary — who played her son, Eddie Winslow — to clarify what White had said.

“He said something about, ‘She must want to melee.’ I said, ‘What’s a melee?’ He said, ‘a fight.’ I turned around — if he wanna fight, I would,” she told ET. “Darius [McCrary] grabbed me. I was gonna whip his behind.”

The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to White’s replies for comment.

The Urkel actor has previously suggested there were on-set tensions between him and his Family Matters co-stars during the show’s run. In an interview with TV One’s Uncensored in 2021, White said that tension was due to him not being “welcomed to the cast at all.”

That attitude, according to several stars who appeared in an episode of E!’s True Hollywood Story, was in reaction to actors being told at one point by showrunners that the “dynamic was going to change” to make the show more about Urkel.

“And we said ‘OK,’” Payton said at the time. “We weren’t happy about it. I think along the way it got to be a little resentful, but it was just an adjustment that we had to make.”

“My arrival to Family Matters was a rocky start at the beginning,” White said. “They kind of had to accept that I was there. That was a process.”

Eventually, though, the cast came around, he says. “Over time, figuring out that, ‘If you do this and I do that, we win’ — that’s ultimately what evolved.”