John Goodman said he was “very depressed” when ABC canceled “Roseanne” following star Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet earlier this year.
“I was broken-hearted, but I thought, ‘OK, it’s just show business, I’m going to let it go.’ But I went through a period, about a month, where I was very depressed,” the actor said in an interview with the Sunday Times. “I’m a depressive anyway, so any excuse that I can get to lower myself, I will. But that had a great deal to do with it, more than I wanted to admit.”
Goodman, who played Barr’s husband on the ABC sitcom and its recent revival, said he was “surprised” by the network’s swift reaction to the tweet and its decision to cancel the show. He also said he knows “for a fact” that Barr is “not a racist,” but stopped short of throwing his full support behind his fired co-star.
“I’ve never tweeted or twarted, it’s not useful for me,” Goodman said.
ABC canceled “Roseanne” in May following Barr’s widely condemned tweet that said that former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett looked as if the Muslim Brotherhood and “Planet of the Apes” had a baby. After extensive negotiations to end Barr’s involvement, the network recently said it would move forward with a spinoff titled “The Conners.”
“She had to sign a paper saying that she relinquished all her rights to the show so that we could go on. I sent her an email and thanked her for that. I did not hear anything back, but she was going through hell at the time,” Goodman said. “And she’s still going through hell.”
As for how the show would proceed without the central figure for which it’s named and whose identity is a defining character of its sensibility, Goodman said it’s still “unknown.”
“I guess [Dan will] be mopey and sad because his wife’s dead,” he said.