Bob Saget's funeral in January 2022 was, among many things, the unexpected reset button for a relationship that had quietly frayed over the previous decade. According to recent podcast interviews from Full House castmates — reported by Us Magazine — the gathering brought the Olsen twins back into the orbit of people they'd essentially drifted from, and the reconnection landed better than some might have expected given the history.
That history, of course, includes the Fuller House situation.
The Fuller House Wound That Mostly Healed
When Netflix revived the Full House universe in 2016, almost everyone came back. The notable exceptions were Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who had shared the role of Michelle Tanner as infants and children throughout the original series' run. Their absence stung — and some castmates were not shy about saying so at the time. Candace Cameron Bure and others publicly expressed disappointment, and the show handled the twins' absence with an in-joke that acknowledged the elephant in the room without quite resolving it.
But here's the thing about wounds and time: the cast's more recent comments, per Us Magazine's reporting, suggest the Fuller House snub is not the open sore it once appeared to be. The narrative has shifted from "why didn't they come back" to something more like a shrug of genuine understanding — even if that understanding took a few years to arrive.
What Choosing Fashion Over Michelle Tanner Actually Means
The angle that makes the Olsens genuinely fascinating — rather than just Hollywood-famous — is the deliberateness of their exit. Mary-Kate and Ashley didn't fade out. They walked away from one of the most recognizable child-star legacies in American television history and built something entirely their own: a fashion empire that includes The Row, a critically respected luxury label that has earned serious industry credibility far removed from TGIF nostalgia.
That pivot reframes the Fuller House absence entirely. It wasn't a snub so much as a statement of identity. Returning to play Michelle Tanner as an adult would have meant re-entering a world they'd consciously left — and for what? To service someone else's nostalgia? The Olsens have been consistent: they fiercely protect their personal lives, they don't do press cycles the way their former castmates do, and they appear to have made a calculated choice that privacy and creative reinvention are worth more to them than the cultural warmth of a reunion.
It's hard not to respect the coherence of that position, even if it made things awkward on a Netflix set in 2016.
The Part Where Bob Saget Changes Everything
Saget's death in January 2022 — and the funeral that followed — serves as the emotional pivot point in whatever story the Full House cast is collectively telling about themselves. Per Us Magazine's reporting based on cast podcast interviews, the twins attended and reconnected with castmates they hadn't seen in some time. The circumstances were devastating, obviously, but grief has a way of dissolving the smaller grievances.
Saget was, by all accounts, a genuine connective tissue for that group — someone who maintained relationships with everyone and served as an informal anchor for the cast's sense of itself as a family unit. His absence arguably made the question of who was still close to whom more visible, and the funeral became the occasion where some of those threads got quietly repaired.
The cast's recent comments reflect that. The tone toward Mary-Kate and Ashley in these podcast interviews isn't resentful — it's warm, a little wistful, and notably respectful of the twins' choices.
The Asymmetry Nobody Talks About Enough
There's an interesting gap at the center of this whole conversation: the Full House cast remembers the twins as colleagues, as the little girls who grew up on set, as part of their extended professional family. Mary-Kate and Ashley, for their part, have been largely public about the fact that they don't look back on their child-acting years with uncomplicated warmth. The childhood wasn't entirely their choice, and their subsequent effort to build lives and careers entirely on their own terms suggests they're not especially interested in mining it for sentiment.
That asymmetry — one side holding the memory fondly, the other holding it at arm's length — explains a lot. It explains Fuller House. It explains the privacy stance. It explains why the relationship has stayed cordial but hasn't exactly blossomed into regular cast reunions and Instagram posts.
Neither reading is wrong, exactly. The castmates who remember a warm set family are telling the truth as they lived it. The Olsens who stepped back from that world are also telling the truth as they lived it. The same years just meant different things to different people.
Where Things Actually Stand
Per Us Magazine's reporting, the current state of the relationship is best described as: genuinely cordial, occasionally in touch, mutually respectful — and probably not destined for a group chat. Castmates have spoken warmly about the twins in recent interviews. The Olsens haven't said much publicly, because the Olsens rarely say much publicly, which is itself the whole point.
The Full House cast is, in a sense, still the Full House cast — they do press, they show up for each other, they feed the nostalgia machine with affection and good humor. Mary-Kate and Ashley built something else entirely and guard it accordingly. Both things can be true without anyone being the villain.
The sharpest observation here might simply be this: in a media landscape where former child stars are constantly being pulled back into their origin stories, the Olsen twins' insistence on writing their own second act — and third, and fourth — looks less like a snub and more like the rarest thing in Hollywood. A clean exit, taken seriously, and actually stuck to.
