Christopher Knight says he was tricked into working with a real spider during his Brady Bunch days.
On Thursday, Nov. 7, the former child star, 67, appeared on NBC’s Today with his Brady Bunch costars Barry Williams and Eve Plumb — who played his siblings Greg Brady and Jan Brady, respectively — and discussed several nostalgic moments from the sitcom.
One memory Knight can’t forget came from a season 4 episode filmed in Hawaii called “Pass the Tabu.”
CBS
The scene called for Knight’s character, middle son Peter Brady, to wake up in his bed with a tarantula crawling up his body towards his face. However, the actor says he was duped by the details.
“They did lie to me. They told me that they put ball bearings on its fangs so that it couldn’t inject [anything],” he told Today hosts Hoda Kotb and Carson Daly of what producers told him at the time.
Knight continued, “I was terrified, but I was a perfect kind of terrified because I got to prove my hero self to the ladies. I shouldn’t let them know I’m scared to death.”
Williams, 70, remembered the scene vividly, adding, “And that was a real spider and he had nothing under it, it was on him. And then I came in and I had to figure out how to get it off of him.”
While Williams played the oldest Brady brother on camera, he channeled the role in real life when it came to safely getting the creepy crawler off of Knight.
“I had a tarantula as a pet and I didn’t want it to be hurt, so I was able to scoop it up and let it land,” he said.
NBC
Meanwhile, Plumb, 66, recalled that the Brady girls had their own special pet on set — though Fluffy the cat eventually “just sort of faded away” after the sitcom’s pilot episode.
“That’s TV,” she added. “Stuff comes and it goes.”
Adding to her point, Knight remembered that Fluffy’s replacement, Tiger the dog, also disappeared from the show without any explanation after the second season.
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“Watching the early shows with Tiger – Tiger’s an important element, you’re right,” Knight said. “And he just disappears.”
The Brady Bunch, which aired from 1969 to 1974, also starred Susan Olsen (Cindy Brady), Maureen McCormick (Marcia Brady) and Mike Lookinland (Bobby Brady) as the additional siblings, with the late Florence Henderson as matriarch Carol Brady, wife to Robert Reed’s Mike Brady. The series is available to stream on Pluto TV and Paramount+.
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