23. Almost Rudy Huxtable
Before White auditioned for Family Matters, he auditioned for and almost landed the role of Rudy Huxtable. “We were all packed up and ready to go to New York,” White told Vanity fair, “… 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…” That was when executive producer of the show, Bill Cosby, decided to go a different direction. Keisha Knight Pulliam won the role of Rudy, sending White back to the casting couch.
22. Growing Up Urkel
Just as the writers couldn’t have imagined the popularity of Urkel, neither could White. That adoration created a conflict in White. He was himself a teenager, coping with the hormone-riddled awkwardness of that age. On one hand, he had all this fame, but it was for playing an uber-dork. Reconciling that fame (and the requisite paycheck) with his self-image was difficult. White had to maintain a dorky build, which meant he couldn’t lift weights or get in any kind of athletic shape. He had to shave every day. “I loved playing those characters,” said White of Family Matters to Vanity Fair, “but the fact is that I was maturing… I was retarding my own growth as a man in order to maintain the authenticity to what I thought that character should be.
21. White Wasn’t Alone
As Jaleel White struggled to reconcile himself with the character of Urkel, so too did his fellow cast-members. The show was originally supposed to be a story focused on the Winslow family, an expectation everyone brought to the set. When the show took a different direction, featuring Urkel as much if not more than the family, cast members struggled with it. “Things were definitely strained in the early going,” said White to Vanity Fair. “There’s no sense in hiding that. There was a division between myself and the rest of the cast, but over nine years and 215 episodes, obviously relationships get better.”