When Lori Loughlin walked onto the set of Full House in 1988, John Stamos had already spent a season as Uncle Jesse, the leather-jacketed rocker with the perfect hair and the Elvis records. He knew exactly what kind of woman Jesse needed opposite him. And at first, he admitted this month, he was not sure the new girl was it.
Stamos, now 63, made the confession on Sunday, October 18, during a Full House reunion panel at ’90s Con at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford, with Loughlin, 62, on the same stage. People executive editor Breanne L. Heldman moderated, and Candace Cameron Bure, Dave Coulier, Jodie Sweetin, Scott Weinger, and Andrea Barber were on stage too. According to TV Insider, which credited People’s coverage of the panel, Stamos told the crowd he had gone to creator Jeff Franklin with a worry about her. It took exactly one day of shooting to settle it.
The Daytime Emmy Night Stamos Still Teases Her About
The two were not strangers when Full House paired them up. Both had started in daytime television, and their first meeting came in 1983 at the Daytime Emmys, when Stamos was the young heartthrob of General Hospital and up for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Daytime Drama. Loughlin, still a teenager herself, was the one who opened the envelope.
“That’s how we met because I was the presenter of the category he was up for,” Loughlin told the Hartford audience. “He didn’t win.” The award went to Darnell Williams of All My Children, and Stamos has never quite let it go. “And so to this day he [says], ‘You couldn’t have said, John Stamos?'” she joked, according to TV Insider.
Five years later, that same presenter turned up at the Tanner house. And she was only supposed to stay a little while.
From Six Episodes to Jesse’s Wife and the Twins’ Mom
Rebecca Donaldson arrived in the Season 2 episode “Tanner vs. Gibbler,” which aired on ABC on October 21, 1988. She was Danny Tanner’s new co-host on Wake Up, San Francisco, smart and unflappable, and she was booked for a short run. “I was only supposed to come on for six episodes,” Loughlin said at the panel, as Parade reported.
Viewers had other ideas, and so did the writers. Jesse and Becky nearly eloped in Lake Tahoe in the Season 2 finale, “Luck Be a Lady,” before they thought better of it. They finally married on Valentine’s Day in the two-part Season 4 episode “The Wedding,” and in Season 5, Becky gave birth to twins Nicky and Alex on Michelle’s fifth birthday. Blake and Dylan Tuomy-Wilhoit played the boys from Season 6 through the end of the show in 1995, and again on Netflix’s Fuller House.
Loughlin remembered feeling at home almost right away. “I remember the first week I was there, I was on set with all you guys and laughing about something,” she said. Coulier, she added, made a prediction back then: he wasn’t sure how long the show would last, but he was “pretty sure Lori will be with us forever.”
He was right about the friendship, and it would be tested in ways nobody on that set could have pictured.
What Stamos Wrote About Her Hardest Years
In March 2019, Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, were charged in the college admissions case, accused of paying $500,000 to get their two daughters into the University of Southern California. Netflix dropped her from Fuller House that same month. She pleaded guilty in May 2020 to one count of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, and on August 21, 2020, a federal judge sentenced her to two months in prison, a $150,000 fine, and 100 hours of community service. She reported to FCI Dublin in California on October 30, 2020, and was released on December 28.
Stamos wrote about it in his 2023 memoir, If You Would Have Told Me, recalling the phone call the morning the story broke, when he heard a clicking on the line. “Oh, they may be bugging my phone,” she told him, according to excerpts published by TVLine. “I’ve witnessed moments where giving up could have been the easiest way out for Lori,” he wrote. “To watch her rise, time and again, was like witnessing a master class in resilience,” he added, in a passage quoted by HollywoodLife.
Loughlin went back to work in late 2021, returning as Abigail Stanton in When Hope Calls, and she has since made TV movies such as Fall Into Winter and returned to Blue Bloods in 2024. Her personal life changed again this fall. On September 4, 2026, she filed for divorce from Mossimo Giannulli in Los Angeles Superior Court, citing irreconcilable differences and listing their date of separation as August 31, 2025, according to ABC News and Fox News. The couple married in 1997 and share two grown daughters, Isabella and Olivia Jade.
So six weeks after that filing, when she sat next to Stamos in Hartford, he went all the way back to the beginning and told the crowd what he had once said about her behind her back.
The First Scene That Changed John Stamos’s Mind
His worry in 1988 was never about her talent, Stamos explained. When Franklin cast her, Stamos told him she was “cute” and “adorable,” but he wondered whether she was “tough enough to put Jesse in his place.” Jesse Katsopolis was cocky and vain and used to getting his way, and Stamos figured any woman who could keep him in line would need some steel.
Then the cameras rolled. “Scene one, she came and she put me in my place,” Stamos said, according to People. What he found, he said, was “a perfect combination of this adorable, sweet girl” who could turn up the heat on a scene whenever it needed it.
Anyone who watched Becky roll her eyes at one of Jesse’s schemes, or calmly hand him back his own ego, saw exactly what he meant. Nearly four decades later, on a stage in Hartford, she was still the one putting him in his place.