Roseanne Barr says John Goodman turned down a cameo in her new show and that the two are no longer in contact, closing the door on the reunion she had hoped to build around him. Barr said her son called Goodman to ask him to appear in Meemaw: A Modern Day Fable, but he declined.
She made the disclosure in a recent interview, saying she tried to turn the project into a Roseanne reunion. Asked how she gets along with Goodman and Laurie Metcalf, Barr answered, “I don’t.” When the journalist said they had assumed they were like a family, she replied, “I did too.”
The remark lands because Barr and Goodman once carried one of television’s most familiar marriages, playing Roseanne and Dan Conner on Roseanne for 10 seasons from 1988 to 1997, then returning for one revival season in 2018. The revival did not last. ABC canceled it after Barr posted a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, with the network’s president calling the message “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.” Barr deleted the tweet, said it was “egregious,” and said it happened at 2 in the morning after she used Ambien. She later said she thought Jarrett was white.
That history makes the silence between the two harder to ignore. Goodman defended Barr in 2018, saying he knew for a fact that she was not a racist, and later said he felt terrible about the whole thing. In a more recent interview, he said they had not talked for about seven or eight years and added that he would rather doubt she wants to talk to him. Barr, for her part, said she had not changed that distance: “I don’t.”
The failed cameo also leaves Barr with the same practical problem her new show has had from the start. Meemaw: A Modern Day Fable is an eight-episode, single-camera sitcom she funded with private investors, and she said she is still seeking a distributor. She also said she reached out to Elon Musk about the project and that he has not called her back or returned her calls. For now, the reunion she imagined is not happening, and the show is still looking for a way onto a screen.
