Who's Making Money

Actor Jaleel White sat down with Vanity Fair to chitchat about losing out on being a “Cosby” kid, what he doesn’t like about Tyler Perry and having to play hide-the-sack as he got older in his “Steve Urkel” role. It’s Pure Comedy!

Mike Ryan: Your first acting role was as Van Van Morris, a child-prodigy pianist on “The Jeffersons.” Was it intimidating to play Weezy Jefferson’s foil at such a young age?



Jaleel White: You’ve been doing your homework. At that age, I’m just wide-eyed and just can’t believe I’m at a table reading with George Jefferson and Florence and Mr. Willis. It was amazing and it was surreal. I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. I was just being a cute kid. That was such a fun week and I remember Sherman Helmsley being so nice to me. I did an episode of “Mr. Belvedere” too. I’ve been working in TV, man, for 31 years.

That’s going to make a lot of people feel old.



I’m 34! It doesn’t make me feel old. If anything, it makes me feel really proud.

Is it true that you were originally cast as Rudy Huxtable on The Cosby Show?

Yep, that’s why the character was named Rudy—it was intended to be a boy. That’s my tragic auditioning story. We were all packed up and ready to go to New York and my agent had told my parents that they needed to start looking for places to live out there. Next thing you know, there was one more audition and that was supposed to be a formality at the network. And a little girl comes walking in, and I’m like—even at eight years old—“Who’s she?” And they’re like, “She’s auditioning for Rudy, too.” So I’m like, “Oh, it’s not as much of a formality as I thought.” That was my first time walking into a room of 30 people staring at you going, “O.K., make me laugh.” They were in such a hurry to get to New York and start filming that they came out and picked the kids one by one right in front of all of us. Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Tempest Bledsoe . . . The rest of us all went home crying. It was amazing. Obviously I’m grateful that things worked out the way they did; I think it put a little more money in my pocket.

Was Cosby in the room?

Yeah, he made the decision that he wanted the family to mirror his exact family.

Sadness and Bill Cosby’s presence don’t seem to go together.



Believe me, they do.

Sorry for bringing up a sad story.



First of all, let’s get something straight: all of these rejections resulted in me making a sh*tload of money elsewhere.

Damn, we had no idea Jaleel White had been acting for so long. Did you? BTW, how hilarious is it that he keeps repeating how much more money he got by not doing “The Cosby Show?” Clearly somebody is not a big fan of Bill either.

Keep reading for Jaleel’s take on “Family Matters” and why he doesn’t ever want to play Urkel again.

If the casting for “The Cosby Show” had played out differently, Jaleel White – yes, Steve Urkel from “Family Matters” – could’ve been Rudy Huxtable instead of Keshia Knight Pulliam.

White, 34, tells Vanity Fair that the character was originally supposed to be a boy.

According to White, he thought he was all squared away – his agent had even told his parents to start looking for places in New York. But then, with one more audition left that was supposed to be a “formality for the network,” “a little girl comes walking in, and I’m like—even at eight years old—‘Who’s she?’” White recalls.

“And they’re like, ‘She’s auditioning for Rudy, too.’ So I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s not as much of a formality as I thought.’”

After lining up all the potential Huxtable kids, White, needless to say, was passed over. “The rest of us all went home crying. It was amazing. Obviously, I’m grateful that things worked out the way they did; I think it put a little more money in my pocket.”

Indeed, White continues, any job he didn’t get was probably for the best. “Let’s get something straight: All of these rejections resulted in me making a s--load of money elsewhere.”

Presumably, some of that cash came from his nine-year run as Steve Urkel, a job that White says he took seriously.

“I loved playing those characters…If I were Bart Simpson and I were animated, I’d still be on the air right now,” he says. The issue was that he was getting older. “I knew physically I had made certain sacrifices to keep that property alive that just couldn’t be made anymore. I wasn’t changing my hair; I was staying out of the gym. To be honest, I was retarding my own growth as a man in order to maintain the authenticity to what I thought that character should be.”

Meaning he apparently wore his pants way too tight for too long – White says network execs started mentioning “the bulge of my sack!” In the last season, the pants became looser. “It’s not overly sophisticated,” White says. “I’m the highest paid black kid in the history of television, just so you understand that. I was trying to prolong the checks!”

And in case you’re curious, not even White knows what happened to poor Judy Winslow, the character that seemed to just disappear.

“I didn’t get an explanation. Her momma asked for too much and they sent her upstairs. That was it,” he recalls. “Back then, family television had a way of getting away with certain things that, obviously, you couldn’t get away with now.”

White stars as a bango-strumming teacher in the family film “Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer,” in theaters now.

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