Susan Olsen, who played Cindy Brady on "The Brady Bunch," revealed that she "almost died" on the set of the sitcom.
The 63-year-old actor opened up about the experience during a conversation with her former co-stars Christopher Knight and Barry Williams on "The Real Brady Bros" podcast.
"I got injured. I almost died,” she said, according to the New York Post.
"On the Culver lot, they were shooting something — I would assume, in the girl's bedroom — and 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 continued. "It hit the makeup man first, [bounced] off the body makeup woman, and hit me in the face."
Olsen was left seriously injured, with her wounds visible during the wedding scene between her on-screen mother, Carol (Florence Henderson), and Mike (Robert Reed).
"You can tell, if you look at the ceremony and you see the three girls on one side, if you were to zoom in really tight, you can see my face is quite swollen," she told Knight and Williams, who played Peter and Greg on the show. "I look different. You can even see it in some of the early publicity shots. You can tell my face is a little swollen."
At the time, only Henderson, who died from heart failure in 2016 at the age of 82, offered her comfort.
"In fact, I don't just wanna cry," she recalled. "I want to sob. I'm just gonna let go and forget all my pride and just sob because this hurts."
She made the decision to step away from work to go the the doctor.
"The saddest news is that we didn't sue Paramount, because I would have made more off of that than the show," Olsen added. "But I came to work the next day. Florence was the first one to see me. She's like, ‘You make sure everybody sees her.' And my mom was like, ‘Oh, yes, I will.' Because everybody was trying to say, ‘It didn't really hit her. She's fine.'"
"The Brady Bunch" ran for five seasons, from 1969 to 1974. The beloved series centered on Mike, a man with three sons, marrying Carol, a woman with three daughters, and the challenges of blending their families.
"The Brady Bunch Hour" aired in 1976 as a variety show featuring the original cast. In 1995, "The Brady Bunch Movie" was released, offering a parody of the iconic sitcom.
Olsen was scheduled to star in a reboot, but stated that it fell through because of "cancel culture" and "woke Hollywood," according to the New York Post.
During a podcast interview on the “WalkAway Campaign” in October, she said the experience is "something that I want known, because it's just another example of cancel culture and woke Hollywood and woke media."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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