Not cool, Clooney!
When Roseanne star Sara Gilbert decided to get the band back together for a reboot of the beloved eighties/nineties sitcom, it didn’t take long to get everyone on board.
But one person wasn’t biting -- George Clooney.
Before Clooney became a household name as dreamy doctor Doug Ross on ER, he portrayed a colleague of Roseanne’s at the factory she worked at on the series.
In a new interview on Howard Stern's SiriusXM radio show, Barr revealed how hunky Clooney wasn’t into joining the revival.
"Well, George Clooney didn't want to come on -- so that was a bummer, but he lives in Italy," she told Stern. "He’s said some really silly things about me, but I still love him."
Stern also quizzed Barr on an old rumor that when the sitcom hit number one, ABC sent the cast and crew a giant chocolate one, which Clooney smashed to pieces with a bat.
“Well, we had had some problems [with the network] before that,” responded Barr.
Clooney or no Clooney, the show must go on and the reboot debuts its first episode on ABC on Tuesday night.
Featuring all of the other cast favorites -- including John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf and Lecy Goranson -- the show will see the family tackle aging, opioid addiction, healthcare and politics.
Barr told Stern she isn’t concerned about attaining the same kind of ratings the original series did.
"No. I just think it's impossible to do that,” she explained. “ We used to get 40 million viewers a week, now you get 3 million. I'm just hoping to get ...6 [million]? There were only 4 networks or something back then, so now there's like 900. There's a lot of competition."
ET spoke to Barr and Goodman at Friday’s premiere of the show in Los Angeles, California, where they discussed how they would not be avoiding controversy in coming storylines, which feature Roseanne as a Donald Trump supporter.
"[We're] just going to show a realistic depiction of this family and, you know, they have so much in common with other American families," she said. "Everybody's mad at everybody so we'll find a way through and hopefully other people will too."
Roseanne premieres Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET on ABC. See more on the reboot below.
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