The Conners is gearing up to premiere this October, without Roseanne Barr. After Roseanne was canceled following the titular character’s racist tweets aimed at White House aide Valerie Jarrett, ABC decided to make a spinoff with the rest of the cast. Though the network has not yet revealed how the show will address Barr’s removal, John Goodman (who plays Roseanne’s husband, Dan) has an idea.
“It’s an unknown. I guess he’ll be mopey and sad because his wife’s dead,” the 66-year-old actor says bluntly in a new interview with The Times.
“I was broken-hearted, but I thought, ‘OK, it’s just show business, I’m going to let it go,’” he adds about his initial reaction to Roseanne‘s cancelation in May. “But I went through a period, about a month, where I was very depressed. 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.”
As for those controversial tweets? The response was shocking to him. “I was surprised. I’ll put it this way, I was surprised at the response. And that’s probably all I should say about it,” he says cautiously. “I know, I know, for a fact that she’s not a racist.”
Goodman is still on good terms with Barr and reached out to her after the show’s cancelation, but to no avail. “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,” he explains. “I did not hear anything back, but she was going through hell at the time. And she’s still going through hell.”
