Sometimes everything happens for a reason. Other times, everything happens because you’re friends with Roseanne. In his new A.V. Club interview, Tom Arnold reminisces about the very many roles he’s had during his decades-long career, and how it all began with that plum writer’s gig on that insanely successful sitcom. “Your first job is on the number-one show, and you’re working around all these great writers and actors, and it’s a great place to learn, but it just seemed like my friend’s show,†Arnold recalls, explaining that he took the job after a comedy club job in Minneapolis fell through. “She was putting together a show, I had no idea how big it was, which was probably good because I really hadn’t done much.â€
However, with success comes major beef, specifically Arnold versus Julia Louis-Dryfus while he was shooting The Jackie Thomas Show in 1993, a feud that Michael Richards was dying to escalate. “I went out and we had this stupid skirmish where Julia Louis-Dreyfus told me how offended she was that I wrote a nasty note, and I told her how offended I was that she parked in my spot or whatever, and then Roseanne took a picture of John Goodman’s ass and put it on her car and in soap wrote ‘Julia Louis Dry-puss.’ Very, very mature, very adult,†Tom recalls. Arnold also suspects Chuck Lorre still hates him for giving him the boot from Roseanne all those years ago. Given Lorre’s current Two And A Half Men nightmare predicament, it’s a coin toss as to whether Tom would beat out Charlie Sheen for biggest pain in his ass. Says Arnold, “Chuck might say that. Depends on how his sense of humor is.â€