Tony Danza is reflecting on the moment he knew Alyssa Milano was the perfect casting choice for his tomboy daughter, Samantha, on Who’s the Boss?
“[Alyssa] was 10 when she got on the show. I found her on a VHS cartridge that somebody sent from New York,” Danza, 74, exclusively tells Us Weekly while discussing his latest film, Re-Election. “We were looking for kids, and these precocious kids kept coming in. And I was like, ‘I don’t want that. That’s not what you want [for this role].’ And then there was this little girl, and she had a black eye — which ended up being part of the show — and she came in and knocked us dead.”
Danza starred as housekeeper and single dad Tony Micelli on the hit ABC (and later NBC) sitcom, which ran for eight seasons from 1984 to 1992. Milano, 53, was cast as his onscreen daughter. Judith Light portrayed Tony’s boss, Angela, while Katherine Helmon played her mother, Mona. Danny Pintauro starred as Angela’s young son, Jonathan.
Milano’s character was a true tomboy, which is why Who’s the Boss? opted to use the actress’ black eye to its advantage in the pilot episode, making it the catalyst for the entire series. After Sam receives a shiner from getting in a fight in her NYC neighborhood, Tony whisks her away to suburbia for a better life. “I thought you loved New York,” his neighbor says in the show’s opening sequence. “I do,” he responds, “but I love my daughter more.”
In addition to its top-notch cast and Angela and Tony’s will-they-or-won’t-they relationship — which did turn romantic down the line — Who’s the Boss? was lauded for its willingness to push beyond stereotypical gender roles. Having a male character work as the housekeeper while a single mother was portrayed as the successful, well-off businessperson was a daring structure for its time, but Danza tells Us that it was all “by design.” It would, after all, be impossible not to center women like Light, Helmon and Milano on set.
Who’s the Boss? was also often praised for never using Tony’s role on the show as a joke, although it certainly wasn’t afraid to highlight its trailblazing storytelling, either.
“There was an [episode] where I break up the date [Angela] is on, and I have the guy up against the wall with a bat, and he says, ‘Angela, who is this?’ And she says, ‘Grant, that’s my housekeeper,’” Danza recalls of one episode. “He says, ‘Angela, that’s the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen!’ It’s so good.”
Danza remains happy with the work he did on the show, even watching it back now. He recently stumbled on an episode from season 5, the series’ first at NBC, and was impressed by everyone’s performances — even if he couldn’t hear what anyone was actually saying.
“I was switching around [channels] and it was on, so I stayed and I watched,” he said, noting that season 5 was an “interesting year” for the cast because “all bets were off” after swapping networks. “But there was something wrong with the audio. So [I watched] with no audio. I do [that] with old movies because I want to watch the work. And I couldn’t believe it. I loved it. It was so detailed. I could tell what was going on without listening. I thought it was really good.”
Looking back, Danza says he’s particularly satisfied with how the show was able to stay universally relatable and watchable for all ages.
“I’m proud of the fact that you could sit down with your family and not worry about the message you were going to get,” Danza explains. “I worried about the message every week. I was like, ‘OK, wait a minute. There’s kids out there and parents listening to this.’ And I mean, we certainly pushed the envelope with Mona’s [edgier] comments, but most of those hopefully went over kids’ heads.”
“I didn’t want a woman, a mother, to be sitting there being embarrassed watching the show because she doesn’t know if [her kid] should hear this,” he adds. “So, I was really careful about that.”
It was Danza’s latest film, Re-Election, that sparked the career retrospection. The actor portrays Stan, the father of emotionally stunted, middle-aged Jimmy (played by writer-director Adam Saunders), who is desperate to go back to high school to try and win a long-lost race for class president. Jimmy’s obsession with the past plays into one of the movie’s central themes of unfinished business.
While eight seasons might seem like enough to make a sitcom feel finished, Danza admits that it’s the years after the series wrapped that tend to spark a sense of regret. The desire to stay in the sitcom business, he explains, ultimately led him to turn down a role that in hindsight may have been a good choice for his career.
“I was hell-bent to be the funniest guy on TV. I wanted to do another sitcom [after Boss] and I got offered this part in a one-hour series, and I said, ‘[No], I’m gonna do a sitcom, that’s what I do,’” Danza recalls. “And I look back on it now, and I really think that was maybe a big turning point in what I’ve been aspiring to, what I want to do, and what I want out of my career. … I think I took a wrong turn there.”
Still, Danza says he tries not to look back on his life choices with remorse.
“There’s an old saying that if you’re at war with the past, you have no future,” he tells Us, a lesson Jimmy ultimately learns himself in Re-Election. “And it’s absolutely true.”
Re-Election is available on demand now.
