Mindy Cohn says plans for a revival of “The Facts of Life” have formally been scrapped because of some unexpected “drama” with a former co-star.
Showing on SiriusXM’s “Jeff Lewis Live” this week, Cohn mentioned talks a couple of revival of the beloved sitcom ramped up within the wake of the 2021 ABC particular “Live in Front of a Studio Audience,” which featured an all-star re-creation of a traditional episode.
The success of that particular, Cohn defined, sparked the curiosity of producer Norman Lear, who rapidly obtained in contact together with her and her surviving forged mates Kim Fields, Nancy McKeon and Lisa Whelchel. (Lear died in December.)
“We got into talks and we hired a writer, and the four of us got together on Zoom,” she mentioned. “This was during COVID, and we had meetings with Norman about it.”
These discussions fell aside, nonetheless, after one of many actors allegedly tried to hunt out a distinct alternative that may’ve concerned her character from the sequence, which ran from 1979 to 1988.
“One of the girls went behind our backs, tried to make a separate deal for a spinoff just for herself, and devastated the rest of us,” Cohn mentioned. “For a 40-year friendship and sisterhood, there was a tidal wave of emotion around it.”
She went on to notice: “She was a greedy bitch. I’ll say it.”
“The Facts of Life” was initially conceived as a by-product of “Diff’rent Strokes” and targeted totally on the character of Edna Garrett (performed by the late actor Charlotte Rae). The sequence adopted Edna as she turned a housemother at a non-public all-girls college in upstate New York.
The scholars below her watch included the spoiled Blair Warner (Whelchel), the gossipy Tootie Ramsey (Fields) and the naive Natalie Inexperienced (Cohn).
Cohn, who just lately appeared within the AppleTV+ sequence “Palm Royale,” notably didn’t establish which of her co-stars was accountable for the demise of the “Facts of Life” revival. However she mentioned Lewis and his co-hosts “could guess” based mostly on her latest social media exercise.
After the SiriusXM interview aired, followers started speculating Cohn might have been referring to Fields, who was noticeably absent when Cohn, McKeon and Whelchel appeared on “The Drew Barrymore Show” in February. Others advised it was Whelchel, who wasn’t included in a bunch photograph with Fields and McKeon that Cohn shared on Instagram in 2022.
Representatives for Fields and Whelchel didn’t instantly reply to HuffPost’s request for remark.
Although Cohn advised in her interview that she’s made peace together with her unidentified co-star, she additionally harassed that followers shouldn’t anticipate plans for a “Facts of Life” revival to begin up once more anytime quickly.
“It’s dead. It’s very dead,” she mentioned. “We were united for 40 years over not talking about each other, not doing dirty ― you know, ‘all for one, one for all’ ― and this kind of wrecked that, which is sad, really sad.”
Watch a clip of Mindy Cohn’s “Jeff Lewis Live” interview beneath.
