Months after ABC canceled Roseanne following a racist tweet from Roseanne Barr, John Goodman has opened up about how he felt in the days and months following the show’s abrupt ending. “I was brokenhearted, but I thought, ‘O.K., it’s just show business, I’m going to let it go,’” Goodman told The Times of London in a recent interview. “But I went through a period, about a month, where I was very depressed. I’m a depressive anyway, so any excuse that I can get to lower myself, I will. But that had a great deal to do with it, more than I wanted to admit.”
When asked how he felt about ABC’s response to Barr’s tweet—“Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” a reference to former Barack Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett—the magazine reported that Goodman took a very long pause before saying, “I was surprised. I’ll put it this way, I was surprised at the response.” After another pause, he added, “And that’s probably all I should say about it.” And finally, after one more lengthy silence: “I know—I know—for a fact that she’s not a racist.” Goodman did not say what he thought of the tweet itself—or what Barr might have meant by it, if its sentiment was not Islamophobic or racist.
Although Roseanne was quickly canceled, Goodman and the rest of the cast, minus Barr, will be back on a new ABC spin-off, The Conners, this fall. As Goodman noted, Barr agreed to relinquish her rights to the new show, as well as any share in its profits. “I sent her an e-mail and thanked her for that,” he said. “I did not hear anything back, but she was going through hell at the time. And she’s still going through hell.”
But make no mistake: Goodman is glad to be back on The Conners. The actor said he immediately told the network “I’m your boy” when asked to return. That’s a far cry from how he felt about the show’s original 1997 finale, to which Goodman said his response was “good riddance.”
“The material had run its course after about six years, but we stayed on for nine,” Goodman said. “But then I missed it. And it was such a gas last year. We were all a team, even more than before.” That said, Goodman knows he and the cast face a monumental task: proving that this show is worth all the controversy it’ll inevitably stir, and that it can retain the original show’s fan base even without its title matriarch. As for what his character might actually be doing when we meet Dan again on The Conners? “I guess he’ll be mopey and sad because his wife’s dead.”
