Jodie Sweetin, one of the stars of the iconic late ’80s to mid-’90s family sitcom “Full House,” recently recounted the first time she drank alcohol and the impact it had on her life during a podcast interview earlier this month.
Sweetin, who played Stephanie Tanner on the show, has been open about her struggles with drug and alcohol addiction in the past. The former child actor was a guest on the Nov. 20 episode of The Skinny Confidential’s “Him & Her” podcast, hosted by Lauryn Evarts Bosstick and Michael Bosstick.
Sweetin revealed the first time she had alcohol was at the wedding of Candace Cameron Bure — who played D.J. Tanner on the series — to hockey player Valeri Bure. The wedding took place around a year after the end of “Full House,” which ran from 1987 to 1995.
“Well, the first time I ever drank, I was like, 14, 13 … and it was at Candace’s wedding and I was just a blackout drinker,” Sweetin said. “The last thing I remember doing, I think, is somewhere around the M of a ‘YMCA,’ and then I don’t remember anything from the rest of the night.
“It was awful and it was ugly, and it was embarrassing,” she added. “My mother was horrified.”
Sweetin was then asked if her parents were aware she was taking part in the adult festivities.
“I was at the table and I was drinking… and I was across the room from my mom,” Sweetin said. “They would pour a glass of wine, and then they’d get around to pouring more, and I was like, ‘I’ll take a little more, please.’ Like an idiot 13, 14-year-old. It was a lot of red wine and the bathroom was very white, not a good mix.”
Sweetin was “horrified the next day” and recalled feeling “awful” about her behavior, but said something in her “clicked,” and her sense of embarrassment morphed into euphoria.
“I was like, ‘Oh, that was fun. You didn’t give a shit about anything. You just don’t remember it,’” she stated.
But Sweetin also said she realized her antics were not the norm for her peers.
“I definitely knew at an early age, I’d say around 15,16, I knew that I drank and partied in ways that my friends did not,” she recalled. “And that they were like ’What, bro? Settle down.”
She went on to seek out people who wouldn’t judge her, “finding different people that didn’t make you feel so bad about what you were doing.”
Later in the interview, she spoke about her past addiction, her goals during that time, and why she always went “too far.”
“I was not a person who was like ‘Oh, let’s just sip wine with dinner,’” she said. “I was like, ‘If we ain’t doin’ a bottle, what’s the point?’ I always knew that my goal was like, blackout drinking or just getting as wasted as possible.”
In her 20s, the actor noted how she was going down a frightening path.
“I did not think I would probably see my 30th birthday, the way I was going in my like mid-20s, like 24, 25,” Sweetin recalled. “And then life changed. I got married again, and quickly found out I was pregnant after that — and then it was like, ‘OK. This is what we’re doing now.’”
“Everything changed. It was up and down, it wasn’t perfect,” she added. “I haven’t had a perfect journey, but that really was the thing that changed everything that was like, ‘Oh, OK. Party time’s done. I gotta take care of somebody else.’”