Susan Olsen didn’t like dumbing herself down on “The Brady Bunch.”
The actress, 63, appeared on “The Real Brady Bros” podcast hosted by her TV brothers Barry Williams and Christopher Knight last week and looked back on the impact of her role as the ditzy Cindy Brady.
Williams told Olsen that she was “the cutest person in the world” while portraying the youngest Brady sibling, before explaining that he and Knight, 67, knew she “was a little bit uncomfortable with the nature” of her character.
“You’re so much smarter than your character. You’re so much edgier than your character,” Williams, 70, said to Olsen. “You’re the least like Cindy. Your personality is the least like their character than any of us.”
The group discussed a scene from the 1969 pilot episode of the sitcom where matriarch Carol Brady (Florence Henderson) tells her daughters she feels butterflies, to which Cindy replies, “Are you sleeping with your mouth open, mommy?”
“Here it is right there. You’re saying the most idiotic thing imaginable,” Williams said of Olsen’s TV moment.
He then jokingly called Cindy “stupid,” as Olsen explained, “That’s just how my career was. And it was something I had to accept. And it was really emphasized when my son was old enough to start watching the things I was in.”
Olsen recalled the time her son, Michael, watched a Disney movie where Olsen’s character didn’t know what being British meant.
“And my son said, ‘So you always play the stupid child.’ And I said, ‘Mike, you’re right. I did.’ And he goes, ‘Wow. Do you think you had anything to do with that?’ I’m like, ‘Well, I hope not!’” the actress recalled.
“But my mother always said, ‘It’s cute,’” she added.
Olsen quipped: “She doesn’t have a functioning brain, but she’s cute.”
The actress played Cindy for the sitcom’s full run from 1969 to 1974.
She explained on the podcast how playing Cindy as a child affected her in real life.
“We went back to regular public school. And I used to think, ‘Thank goodness the show is on a Friday because at least the kids have a whole weekend to maybe forget about all the stupid things Cindy did while she was in my body on TV,’” she said.
Olsen added: “I knew every year I’d have a whole new crop of kids that had just arrived in the neighborhood who were going to treat me like I was a freak in a sideshow. But my friends were really good.”
Later in the podcast, Olsen revealed she got injured and “almost died” filming the first episode of the series.
“I was getting body makeup on my legs. Was standing on a makeup chair and something from the catwalk, where they keep all the lights and everything, fell,” she explained. “It hit the makeup man first, [bounced] off the body makeup woman and hit me in the face.”
Olsen joked that she wishes she sued Paramount for the incident “because I would have made more off of that than the show.”
