He Did That: Jaleel White Reflects on Life as Urkel
Steve Urkel was only supposed to appear in a single episode of Family Matters. It was the 12th episode of the new ABC sitcom about a working-class family in Chicago, and the script called for a hopeless nerd with a penchant for swallowing mice to ask eldest daughter Laura (Kellie Shanygne Williams) to a school dance. But 13-year-old Jaleel White left such a strong impression with the audience during his few minutes onscreen as Steve Urkel that he was quickly written into the following episode. When the second season rolled out, White was added to the main cast.
“Steve Urkel became the linchpin for the show,” White writes in his new memoir Growing Up Urkel, which hits shelves this week, “the chaotic ball of energy pinging and bouncing off the other characters, creating moments of humor and tension that propelled the storylines forward.”
It also propelled White to incredible fame. But as he reveals in the book, he failed to capitalize on many opportunities due to shortsighted agents, greedy network executives, and loving parents who weren’t wise to the ways of Hollywood. He did, however, manage to avoid all of the pitfalls of child stardom, graduate from UCLA, and launch a successful career as character actor, game-show host, and voice actor that continues to this day. He even revived the Urkel character in cartoon form for a 2019 episode of Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?, and the 2013 animated film Urkel Saves Santa: The Movie!.
But a 2016 attempt to do a Fuller House-style reboot of Family Matters imploded when White balked at the concept pitched to him by producer Bob Boyett. The central conceit was that Urkel and Laura were now married and had a nerdy son, Steve Urkel Jr. “Carl and Harriette will stop by from time to time,” Boyett explained of Laura’s parents, “perhaps two episodes out of the first season order. But this incarnation of the show will revolve more around you and Laura and your new family, and your son who is so much like you when you were his age.”
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White hated every aspect of the pitch. He countered with a meta idea about a young Jaleel White back in 1989 landing a role on Family Matters, and struggling to adjust to the aftermath of early fame. “I knew this concept had a better chance of landing with today’s audiences than the stale reboot pitch Bob was offering,” White writes. “With every fiber in my body, I felt this was the story that would hit a nostalgic nerve in all of us and not disturb the integrity of the original show.”
Boyett didn’t agree. They hit a stalemate. And the next best thing White could do was write the story of his early years into a book, which might indeed be adapted one day into a television series. We called up White while he was in Philadelphia on a book tour to talk about the memoir, the history of Family Matters, his upcoming stint on Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, his new game show Flip Side, and what the future still might hold for Steve Urkel.
Why did this feel like the right time to do a book?
First of all, people are really enjoying Nineties nostalgia, including myself. There’s a simplicity to life back then, man, that’s pretty enjoyable for all of us. It was a time when we had four channels, and used to get a girl’s phone number on a napkin, so that’s pretty cool.
Also, there were a lot of questions that have been asked of me for a long, long time. And really it’s all about timing. When I started putting together my book proposal and answering the questions that fans had for me, I realized I might have enough for a book.
I thought I knew your story, but there was a lot in there I didn’t know. For example, I had no idea you drew inspiration from Martin Short’s famous character Ed Grimley, Pee-wee Herman, and Revenge of the Nerds when creating Urkel.
I had a VHS tape of The Best of Saturday Night Live. I just was a Black kid doing his best Ed Grimley, and throwing some of those other herbs and spices in there. And it really wasn’t very good in the beginning, to be quite honest. If you look at the early episodes, the mannerisms became more pronounced with time and rehearsal. But it’s just kind of funny — because those character references were white, nobody ever really guessed what my inspirations were. And it provided something that, quite frankly, there was no template for television to even create.
The second I read “Ed Grimley” in your book, I was like, “Of course!”
That’s because Black offerings in television have always been treated as monolithic. They’re not.
You wrote in the book that Urkel’s cool alter-ego, the Stefan character, “profoundly shaped your public image just enough to protect your future endeavors” as an adult. Can you elaborate on that?
I was a kid that was really just struggling to fit in in real life while playing that character. And so I wasn’t seeing myself, quite frankly, like others were seeing me. For me, it was no greater than doing a school play, but just on a really, really high level. And then [Family Matters producer] David Duclon was like, “People need to see this side of you.”
And I actually found the [Stefan] character, as I stated in the book, a little boring to be quite honest. I think that really just came from a place of being awkward, not necessarily feeling that I could be myself or anything like that at that age. And so when I hit that door in that white suit and those screams came, it was a shock to me, like, “Are you kidding me? This is just me.” I was so fully immersed in the exercise of acting that I didn’t even see that I could possibly deliver everything that Stefan needed in order to be convincing.
I first realized you had way more to offer than Steve Urkel when the TV movie Camp Cucamonga aired in 1990.
What’s funny about Camp Cucamonga is that I wasn’t meant to be highly featured in that. I wasn’t even treated on set on par with the other stars. And it wasn’t until the character became very popular that they re-aired it, and then reordered the position in the promos to highlight me more. So I was like, “Mom, this is hilarious. They’re making it look like I’m one of the stars like Jennifer Aniston.” So that’s prime example of how even TV will play with time and billing and then promotion.
What a crazy cast with you, Jennifer Aniston, Candace Cameron, Danica McKellar, Breckin Meyer, John Ratzenberger, and G. Gordon Liddy.
Dog, I mean, when you look back on it, it’s such an iconic cast group that they never intended to be iconic.
Do you recall doing the rap?
Oh my gosh, that embarrassing rap. That and the rap that I did about abstinence at 17 about buried any chance of me doing anything legitimate on the rap scene.
I was surprised to realize just how central your school basketball team was to your life at the peak of your fame. How did you balance those two very different worlds?
That’s my mom. My mom refused to let me do autograph signings. I was not traveling every weekend being famous someplace. She really was dead-set on me continuing to be a normal kid in school. And in a world before smartphones, this was possible. It was a very grounding element in my life. As much as at that time the world kept making a big deal about me being a TV star, she kept pushing me back into a normal kid box as soon as she could.
It must have felt like you were leading a double life. You’re playing basketball one moment with regular schoolkids, and then a day later you’re dancing with Bea Arthur at the American Comedy Awards.
It very much felt like a double life, and it also felt quite often [that] I wasn’t allowed to share too much from one life with the other. It would come off braggadocious. “Oh, he’s a show-off,” or something like that.
On some level, the other cast members must have resented all the attention you were getting. Did you sense that at the time?
Yeah. I mean, that’s well documented. I try not to belabor it just because we’re 30 years later. The kids in the long run have remained close-knit. Myself, Kellie, and Darius [McCrary, who played Eddie Winslow], we still talk to each other. Kellie just called me yesterday. But she lives in Maryland. I live in L.A., Darius is just all over. So the dividing line was more between the adults and the kids.
Jo Marie Payton, who played Harriette, has said a number of times over the years that you were sometimes difficult to work with.
I addressed that in the book, and I’ll leave it at that. Jo, what day do you catch her? Was it a Tuesday? Was it Wednesday? Was it a good Tuesday or a bad Wednesday? That’s what I just chalk it up to, I really do.
Fans might be surprised to learn that you and Kellie went through a period where you weren’t speaking, since you were “crushing on each other,” to use your words.
That was me being vulnerable about our time in our early years in high school. And really, I attribute that experience to keeping me away from anything further on set with female co-stars, which I’m grateful for. I’m like, “Ooh, I learned that lesson around high school,” so going into my adult life, I was able to really separate quickly, “We’re at work.”
You two were mature enough hash things out and become friends again pretty quickly.
Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve worked on set, and I won’t say where, where I got a chance to see the two lead actors that didn’t even speak to each other. And I’m like, “Oh, and these guys are adults? OK. They didn’t work that out? Wow.”
I’d love to hear a little about Rosetta LeNoire, who played Mother Winslow. I feel like many people don’t know about her incredible past. She even worked with Orson Welles on his famous Voodoo Macbeth in the 1930s.
Rosetta was our top two producers’ favorite. They really doted over Ms. Rosetta. And Ms. Rosetta was a whip-cracking grandmother on our set. I remember she was always all over Darius. She would just get on me quickly if she ever saw me with food on the set. That was such a Broadway no-no. “How dare you come to the set for rehearsal carrying food?” And she was a stickler since she came up in Broadway. She always had a story to share with us, and everybody was always on their best behavior during rehearsals when Ms. Rosetta was on set, because she didn’t take any smack.
As the years went by, the plots of the show started becoming more and more outlandish. Near the end, you were time-traveling to pirate ships. I just saw one where you, Richie, and 3J transform into three different Bruce Lees. Did you ever think it was starting to get a little too outlandish?
The Nineties were the Nineties. And I see the show in chapters. When I was in middle school, it was fun for me, and it was fun for my peers. When I was in high school, it was more fun for me. When I was in college, it was fun for me, and clearly now my peers had just aged out and were appreciating different entertainment.
Watching [the movie] Friday on campus at UCLA was a seminal moment for me. I was like, “Man, comedy is kind of passing me by.” I don’t mean skill-wise. I knew that I can do what they can do. But I was starting to learn about brands and being kept in a box and what we were not allowed to do.
And so right down to the schmaltzy music at the end of every episode, they had a formula for Family Matters that they wanted you to stick to, and there would be no breaking out of that without a fight. And no war was waged. We were good workers.
It started as a grounded family show. By the end, it really was like a science fiction show.
Yeah. I mean, look, it’s crazy that I worked for the producers who are responsible for the phrase “jumping the shark.” That’s Miller-Boyett. That’s Happy Days. They produced the “jump the shark” episode. So when you can put it in that context, it’s like, “Oh, these guys always obviously jump the shark with their shows.”
And so the crazy plotlines never bothered you?
It didn’t bother me at that time, because in the mid-Nineties, surrealism was just so much more a part of television. It was not unusual for a marketing campaign to revolve around a six-foot-five-inch Black man in a dress to sell some shoes. That’s where I got that the bright idea to combine that with our show in the Grandmama episode.
It really wasn’t until the late-Nineties that there was a total shift to say, “You will not go that far without [the show] being considered Disney Channel or Nickelodeon.” And so, even when I could see the shift, I wasn’t allowed as a performer and a producer to make the shift. It was like, “No, no, no, you will not disturb the business model.” It’s like, “Yeah, but it’s changing.” Single-camera shows were starting to take over. I noticed that with The Office and Bernie Mac and Modern Family. I saw those shows creeping in, and redefining what comedy on television would be.
The money that actors could make on a hit show really changed during your time on Family Matters. The casts of Seinfeld and Friends were pulling in absolute fortunes. Did it seem unfair that you were as famous as they were and making way less?
Our projections were never fair to us. We were undervalued. And in the long run, in 25 and 30 years, we performed right on par with those shows, if not better than them, and I mean globally. So that’s an inequality in the business that’s always existed.
I try to look on the bright side, and the bright side for me is I love when I get a chance to go to Europe and other countries and I step off a plane, they know me. Because with the way television works on these streamers, you could be on a very successful show and nobody knows who the hell you are in other parts of the world.
Do you have any points in syndication?
I do. I talk about this in the book. I just don’t get what I should have gotten because of a little game one of the lawyers played at Warner Bros. at the time.
Did you see the Key & Peele sketch about you and the show?
I love that sketch. That’s my favorite sketch. That’s my favorite parody that’s ever been done about the show.
Why?
Because it was just so authentically hysterical. First of all, Jordan Peele’s impersonation of Reggie [VelJohnson, who played Carl] was just hysterical. That skit took things to a surreal place. But I said, if you did the same thing, but made it more grounded, I think it’s a whole show. Reggie being so upset about the ludicrous storyline, that just cracked me the fuck up, man. I want to see that really played out, but grounded, because that was Reggie to some degree. That was really Reggie to some degree. It was like somebody had a spy in our writers room [to] even come up with that with skit. So, definitely let it be known how much I appreciate that skit and what I think it might’ve inspired for us to continue to do.
You write a lot about your parents in the book, how they fought to give you a normal childhood, but how they made some mistakes business-wise. What do you wish they’d done differently to guide your career?
My mom and I have done a lot of work to just make peace with what was between us, because she never really had an instinct for show business. She had an absolute instinct to protect me and get me to college. She was just focused on those two things alone.
I didn’t have traditional showbiz parents in that they weren’t projecting what they wanted for themselves onto me. It was as simple as, “If he stays in show business long enough, he’ll pay for college.” And so she just never could get out of that mindset. My mom drove the same Acura up to set for 100 episodes, and it drove the other moms and the adults on set insane because they knew we were making more money, but my mom wasn’t showing any visible signs of it. So it was kind of frustrating.
For every child-star success story like Jodie Foster and Ron Howard, there are many more people who crash and have very difficult adulthoods. You never had even a tiny scandal or controversy. How did you avoid all that?
Well, I think it’s just something simpler, and it goes back to just Nineties values. I was more afraid of my parents than I was any cop. I actually think, in the weirdest way, that’s healthy parenting. I want my daughter to be more afraid of disappointing our household than of the cops. If the cops pull her over, I want her buttering hard to get out of whatever fuckin’ trouble she’s got herself into before I come onto the scene, because otherwise, she needs to be very much in the right for me to stick up for her.
I know all sitcom stars deal with typecasting. Do you think it’s especially hard if you play a goofy character like a Gilligan or Steve Urkel?
That’s always such a tough question, because I don’t like to play any singular card on why that is. Because I look at somebody like Ed O’Neill, and in my mind he’s very much Al Bundy. But on the business sense, he always had greater reps that knew how to market his value, and keep him active as a number one on the call sheet.
For me, actually, it was cathartic to remind people and reveal to people, “Hey man, I wasn’t the star on that show. I’m glad that you loved my performances, trust me, it validates me in a lot of ways that I’m grateful for.” But I was really just a diverse guy, which is why I can be a game-show host right now, and I’ve done Dancing With the Stars, and I could do drama. I could do a lot of stuff, but I was never marketed by my team as a number one with the highest of individuals who run our business. The one person I came close to maybe doing some bigger business with unfortunately passed away, and I spoke about him finally in my book, and that was [former NBC head] Brandon Tartikoff.
Did you turn down more reality shows in the aftermath of Dancing With the Stars?
Oh, yeah. That’s because reality is a different monster, man. I like being a trained performer. I like being a professional in the sense that I know what I’m doing, I know what the run of show is, and I know what’s required of me. It’s this dance of likability and romance and faux romance. And it was a huge turn-off when shows would call me and ask me to be on rehab shows, and I didn’t even have a substance abuse problem. But they’re like, “Yeah, but we’ll pay you this much money and it’s good TV.” And I’m like, “I’m sorry, bro, that’s deceitful.” And that’s also, not only is it deceitful, but it’s making deals with the devil. I don’t think it should be legally allowed to be able to call those shows reality shows.
Right. Every single aspect of them is fake.
Yeah, they’re fake. The general public really doesn’t have any idea to what degree they are overproduced. They’re literally just putting words in your mouth.
You voiced Steve Urkel in 2019 on Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?, and then again on last year on Urkel Saves Santa: The Movie!. What was it like to go back to the character after all these years?
Scooby-Doo I liked. I should have kept it at Scooby-Doo. The Santa thing just didn’t work out to my liking, and we got hit by two things. HBO was just taking over everything for Warner Bros. from a branding standpoint, and they didn’t want nothing to do with anything family. And it was supposed to be something a little more akin to old-school claymation.
No Black character had ever been the central focus of something that had been done that way. But then when the pandemic hit, they told me it would’ve to be 2D or no deal. People don’t even realize how much you have to survive television development to make anything special. And so I wish I had stopped it with Scooby. I love being a part of the Scooby legacy, but I wish I had just stopped it there.
You wrote in the book about meeting with Bob Boyett about a Family Matters reboot where you’d be married to Laura and have a teenage son just like you. I think it’s fairly obvious why that wouldn’t work, but why was it so unappealing to you.
Tell me your thoughts on that?
It sounds like something I’d watch for four minutes and then turn off.
You literally took the words out of my mouth, expect I would have given it one full episode. You made it worse by saying you wouldn’t return after the commercial.
I don’t think I even made the first commercial on the Mad About You or Murphy Brown reboots, and I liked both of those original shows.
Right. I do not understand this kind of cash-machine obsession with creating a nostalgic car wreck for the purposes of cashing in on a profit. I just don’t get it. I am honest about my feelings about it, and I also celebrate The Connors for pulling it off, because I think they had enough original conceits of the show and cast members that were still reflective of their original look and voice to pull that off. But we don’t.
I wanted to do something that felt more akin to what I’ve written in the book. I feel like the book is the runway for the show that people would appreciate, that would actually create more of just a nostalgic friggin’ rush for people. I could see people just looking at our backgrounds in our studio, the posters on the wall, and going, “Oh my gosh, look at that video game system, I had that.”
We could make something authentic if we kept it close to my book. And sadly, somebody I really grew up admiring a lot told me right to my face, “Nobody’s interested in your memoir.” So it’s taken eight years, but one of these millennials, these great millennials that continue to save my legacy, happens to work at Simon & Schuster and said, “Man, I’d love to write that book with you.”
To be clear, you’re still interested in making a reboot if it could be done the right way?
Oh, absolutely. And I wasn’t offered a reboot. I was offered a contract. There were no producers attached. Only thing that was attached was Bob and the possibility of Netflix and following the Fuller House business model, and also cutting my salary in half. “We will give you $80,000 this time around.” What? So I don’t get to have any say in what’s going to be written, you’re going to cut my old salary in half, I’m going do fewer episodes, and there’s going to be no pitching at all because you’ve already set up that it’s me, Laura, and a kid?
We were always told to ignore television critics. “Oh, they don’t know what they’re talking about. Just ignore those guys. They’re either being biased, snobbish, elitist, or racist.” That’s the way I was told when I was a kid. No, fuck that. I see great television reviews, and I’d like to earn a good one one day.
Are you able to say anything about your upcoming role on Star Wars: Skeleton Crew?
Man, they got me under such an NDA. They got golden handcuffs on me, man. What I will say is it was an honor. I wish it had come out last year, but obviously there was the strike. I’m very excited because I think that it’s going to restore some of the childlike magic that Star Wars was always intended to be. So I’m just honored to be a part of it, and I hope that it lands with the fans.
How is the game show going?
The game show’s kicking ass, man. I love it. Everywhere I go, man… I can’t pick fruit in the grocery store without having some woman coming up to me and questioning me about the answers and the bonus round. That one makes me feel like such a dad. And I’ve done so many episodes of 25 Words or Less and Pictionary that I feel like somehow I was unknowingly groomed for it. I love linear TV, and it’s fading, so to get a chance to work in linear TV that way right now, I’m loving it. And I think the show’s going to get better. I know it’s going to continue to get better.
What are your goals over the next five years or so?
I’d really like to produce a lot more. I’m as enthusiastic about other talent as I am about the talent in myself still.