BREAKING NEWS: Patricia Richardson became a household name during her role as Jill
Taylor on the hit '90s sitcom "Home Improvement." But the actress wasn't
originally slated to play the wife of bumbling TV show host Tim Taylor.
She discussed her last-minute addition to the 'Home Improvement' cast
on HuffPost Live.
Initially, the show's producers wanted Frances
Fisher in the role of Jill, opposite the show's star Tim Allen. But
after Fisher's pilot screen-tested poorly with audiences, producers
scrambled to hire Richardson.
The timing was difficult for
Richardson, who was nursing at the time. "I had just given birth to two
babies, and I really was supposed to do another show for ABC. And that
was supposed to happen 9 months later, so I was going to have all this
time to lose the weight, and go be with my babies and work."
But
ABC executives called her and informed her that she would instead be
working with Allen, then a stand-up comedian, on a new show.
"I
had never heard of Tim and I didn't know anything about it. And they
sent me a tape of Tim. And I said, 'look, I'm nursing twins. You have to
wait for me for 40 minutes while I'm doing that.' And they said, 'oh
yeah, we'll do anything,'" she explained to host Josh Zepps.
She
was convinced when she heard that the producers of 'Home Improvement'
had also worked on Richardson's favorite show. "They told me that the
producers had produced 'Roseanne,' which was my favorite show. So I went
in and met the producers and they talked to me that afternoon. And my
husband and I watched that clip of Tim and that was terrific and so I
thought, I guess I should do this."
Richardson immediately had
chemistry with her co-star. "Tim was so hilarious and we just clicked
right away. It was a really fast five or six days, we did the pilot."
But
she was surprised by the show's success. "I had done a lot of pilots
already, I had already done a couple of television series, so when
everybody laughed a lot, I just thought, 'well, they have a really good
audience,'" she explained. "And I just didn't really think a lot about
it, because you know, usually things just don't go. So I didn't really
have a clue that it was going to be as successful as it was."
Her
husband, however, knew that the show would be a big hit. "My husband
got it. I mean, he came back that night and said, 'this is the show
you're going to do for seven years.'"
"I just went, 'really?' and he was right." (source:huffingtonpost.com)
