TV URBAN LEGEND: Debbie Allen fired Lisa Bonet from A Different World when she took over as the showrunner on the series.
As I pointed out in a recent TV Legends Revealed, A Different World was originally going to center on Maggie Lauten, a White character who was going to be played by Meg Ryan. When Ryan left the project to do movies, Marisa Tomei got the role. However, the show was retooled to instead center on Lisa Bonet as Denise Huxtable, the daughter of Bill Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable from The Cosby Show. The first season of the show was a ratings hit, but it was in a bad place, creatively, so Debbie Allen was brought in to take over as the showrunner on the show.
Both Tomei and Bonet left the show and Allen retooled the program, spotlighting Kadeem Hardison’s Dwayne Wayne and Jasmine Guy’s Whitley Gilbert.
One of the earlier producers on the series, Thad Mumford, has spoken about how difficult Lisa Bonet was to work with on the show, with the actor constantly showing up late and sometimes even falling asleep on set (one of the instances of Bonet nodding off happened during a script reading an episode that Phylicia Rashad was guest starring on the show and Rashad called Cosby to say, “This child is crazy, this child is losing her mind.”). Therefore, Bonet’s behavior has often led to rumors that Allen fired her from the show. Allen, though, revealed what actually went down on the show in an expansive interview about the era in 2015.
HOW DID DEBBIE ALLEN REACT TO LISA BONET’S PREGNANCY?
Allen explained:
When I first took over the show [ It’s A Different World ], one of the first things I did was meet with Lisa Bonet and she secreted to me that she was pregnant. She had married Lenny Kravitz, and you know…I guess Bill had his feelings about that because he was possessive in a way. I mean they were his on-camera wife and children, but they still were his. I mean, the way he was with Phylicia [Rashad] (Debbie’s sister) too, I mean, that’s a whole ‘nother story.So I said, ‘Well Lisa we have to go tell him … Honey, put some shoes on, don’t come up there with a bare foot…get your best dress, let’s comb your hair and let’s go up there to see him, let’s tell him together.’ So we got dressed, we went up there, and oooh…he [Bill Cosby] could see us coming! He saw us a mile away, he could see us coming (laughs). And he sat there and looked at us; and I said, ‘Well, we have some things that we want to tell you.’ He said, “What is it? Are you pregnant?” And then we were like, ‘Oh my God.’ Then he said well what is so different about it? He looked at me, he said, ‘You were pregnant, your sister was pregnant, and so now what?”
HOW DID BILL COSBY REACT TO BONET’S PREGNANCY?
However, Allen had an idea for how they could work the pregnancy into the series, so she wanted to keep Bonet around. She continued:
And I explained to him how I wanted to use it [the pregnancy] on the show because that would be a great thing. To see a girl who’s [this] upper class kid, having a baby, not married because she didn’t want to be married…and the girls could root for her. I was explaining all that we could do. Well, honey I was just blowing smoke and didn’t know it (laughs). He listened to it. We started talking about stories and then immediately — maybe about two or three weeks later — he was like, ‘You know what Debbie? No. She’s pregnant, Denise Huxtable is not pregnant, Lisa Bonet is pregnant, not Denise. So no…no you can’t have it, no we’re not gonna do it, no.’ So he took her [Lisa Bonet] back, I was so mad at him, I wanted to take her, but I understand, he just wanted her back. So she left us [the It’s A Different World cast] to go back home [to the ‘Huxtable’ house], she ended up getting married on the show, and whatever else happened over there.
Bonet then briefly returned to The Cosby Show after having her child, Zoe Kravitz. Denise married a Navy Lieutenant and now had a step-daughter, Olivia (played by a young Raven Symone).
Bonet was then fired from The Cosby Show, as well.
In his autobiography, Lenny Kravitz verified Allen’s version of events.
Of course, in recent years, Bill Cosby has been convicted of sexual assault, making his various moral objections at the time seem so absurd. Bonet was recently asked about this era by interviewer Sanjiv Bhattacharya, and it brings an interesting coda to it all:
Have the revelations about Bill Cosby’s alleged sexual misconduct tainted her memory of those years? She looks evenly at me. “No, it’s exactly as I remember it,” she says. But did you have a sense that anything was happening? “There was no knowledge on my part about his specific actions, but… There was just energy . And that type of sinister, shadow energy cannot be concealed.”
