When you’re watching television and remember that your favorite characters are actors on a set, you may find yourself wondering … where do TV stars go when they climb a staircase?
From Full House to Everybody Loves Raymond to The Nanny, there’s no shortage of iconic sitcom sets with prominently featured staircases. And while we know on an intellectual level that DJ and Raymond and Fran aren’t actually climbing up to the second story of a real house, many of us aren’t sure what happens when actors exit a scene via the staircase.
“A lot of the time, the production designer will build in a set of escape stairs that are off-camera, so the actors don’t have to stand there twiddling their thumbs until ‘Cut!’ is called,” Katie Robbins, creator of the AppleTV+ black comedy Sunny, exclusively reveals in the new issue of Us Weekly. “If not, there’s usually at least a chair waiting for them.”
That wasn’t the case, however, on the classic sitcom The Brady Bunch, which aired from 1969 to 1974. Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia Brady, once revealed that she and the actors who played her sisters and step-brothers had to “huddle” together just out of sight when they took the stairs mid-scene.
“We would go around a corner and we would huddle — all six of us — and try to hide so [viewers] wouldn’t see our shadows,” she said.
As for what McCormick, now 68, would do while she waited for the scene to end?
“I would flirt with the guys,” she said.
In a 2019 four-part Hidden Potential special titled “A Very Brady Renovation,” HGTV star Jasmine Roth worked with the six real-life Brady “kids” (played by McCormick, Eve Plumb, Susan Olsen, Barry Williams, Christopher Knight and Mike Lookinland) to redo the Studio City house shown in the show’s exterior shots to replicate the beloved interior sets.
Roth, 39, echoed McCormick’s story about the Brady Bunch stairs during an interview about the renovation with The Orange County Register.
“The Brady kids told me they’d run up the stairs, they’d turn the corner and all run smack dab into each other because they didn’t have anywhere to go,” she said. “The director would yell ‘Cut!’ and they’d come back down the staircase and they’d go to whichever room, whichever set, the next scene was on.”
Roth added that the renovators had to put Greg Brady’s (Williams) iconic attic bedroom in the basement because the real house doesn’t have a second floor.
“We didn’t want to change the way the house looked from the front, [so] we couldn’t add an attic because it’s a split-level house and on the set, it was set up like a two-story house,” she explained. “What we ended up doing was taking a basement space and we converted it into Greg’s groovy attic.”
For more Hollywood secrets, pick up the latest issue of Us Weekly, on newsstands now.