The co-star who hated every second of working with Tim Allen: “Such a bitch”
Tim Allen is not universally beloved, especially if you were to survey his co-stars.
The actor and comedian is best known for his long-running 1990s sitcom Home Improvement and for voicing Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story. To people of a certain age, though, he is also known for playing a divorced dad who accidentally agrees to be Saint Nick after the chimney diver falls to his death.
We all know 1994’s The Santa Clause is supposedly a Christmas classic, but the more you learn about Mr Allen in real life, the harder it is to see him as the face of holiday cheer.
If we look only at his relationships with co-stars and set aside his imprisonment for possessing over half a kilogram of cocaine, there is plenty of material. In the late ‘90s, for example, Home Improvement was cancelled because Allen’s on-screen wife, Patricia Richardson, was outraged over the pay gap between her and her co-star. Allen was all too happy to take $2million per episode, but had nothing to say when Richardson baulked at getting half that. He let her exit the show and have the show prematurely cancelled rather than, I don’t know, stand up for equal pay.
Then, there are the allegations that he flashed Pamela Anderson during her appearance on the sitcom. According to Anderson, Allen opened his robe to reveal his naked body and quipped that, since he had seen her naked (presumably in the pages of Playboy), it was only fair that she should see him naked, too. Most would disagree.
However, both of these instances pale in comparison to remarks made by one of his co-stars on the Disney+ spinoff of his holiday movies, The Santa Clauses. Saturday Night Live and Happy Endings alum Casey Wilson played a small role in the series pilot in 2022 and had some pretty scathing remarks about her famous co-star. In an episode of her podcast, Bitch Sesh (via Variety), Wilson remembered that their scene involved her throwing things at him when he emerged from a fireplace.
Between takes, Allen went over to a producer who was standing only a few feet away and told him in a voice that was clearly audible to Wilson that the producer needed to tell her to stop stepping on his lines. Embarrassed, the producer did so. According to Wilson, Allen refused to make eye contact or speak with her throughout the duration of the shoot, and said that “everyone was walking on eggshells” when he was around. At one point, a crew member joked, “You’re seeing him on a good day.”
“Tim Allen was such a bitch,” Wilson concluded. “It was truly the single worst experience I’ve ever had with a co-star, ever.” It takes a lot for Hollywood stars to criticise each other in public (Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively aside, so her unvarnished word choice is pretty revealing.
For his part, Allen continued to star in the series until it was cancelled in 2023 and shifted gears to a sitcom about cars called Shifting Gears in which he plays a spiky widower, presumably to avoid another equal fight with a fictional wife.
