Judith Light says her comedic chops were sharpened working on “Who’s the Boss?” with Tony Danza.
Light, 75, spoke about her experience working with Danza, 73, during a roundtable at TheWrap’s Power Women Summit 2024 in Beverly Hills on Tuesday.
Sitting alongside Kathryn Hahn, Kali Reis and June Squibb, the Emmy Award-winning actress reflected on saying she’d “never do a soap opera” or a sitcom.
“This keeps haunting me,” Light said of her past remarks.
“And, of course, I did both of them,” she added.
Light got her big break on the soap “One Life to Live” before starring on the popular ’80s sitcom “Who’s the Boss?”
Light explained that soaps and sitcoms were “things I looked down on — which is what it really was.”
She continued, “That was on me; that was pejorative and discouraging and disproportionate to the work that was actually being done.
“These people are working so hard to do an hour of television every single day,” she said of soap opera actors.
“I’m going, ‘I don’t want to be a part of this, I don’t want to be a part of this.’ It’s like, ‘Who are you?’ And it really was transformational for me in relation to who I was being in the world.”
While Light thought she had rid herself of her “pejorative” attitudes toward certain types of projects after working on “One Life to Live,” she came face to face with them again when she was cast on “Who’s the Boss?” viewing the sitcom as beneath her.
“I thought I’d learned my lesson and then I went, ‘No, actually you haven’t learned it. So go and look at it again,’” she recalled.
But humility wasn’t the only thing she would learn from working on the hit show.
“I learned so much about comedy and timing from Tony Danza. And from those writers,” she added.
“And so all of that was, you know, it’s like, if you’re the same today as you were yesterday, you’re not growing. And what I really — what was important to me was to be able to to grow.”
She went on, “We’re here for such a long and a short period of time, it’s like, ‘How are we going to relate? Who are we going to be?’”
“Those two things that I said I’d never do actually made me come to grips with who I want to be as a person,” Light said.
“Who’s the Boss?” turned 40 this year and ran for eight seasons. It earned 10 Primetime Emmy nominations and one win and, at its peak, had more than 30 million viewers.
The show followed high-powered advertising executive Angela Bower (Light), who hired the manly man and retired baseball player Tony Micelli (Danza) as her live-in housekeeper. While Angela faced her demanding career, Tony was at home cooking, cleaning and caring for her two children.
The show also helped launch the career of actress Alyssa Milano.
