That ’70s Show Star Kurtwood Smith Reveals What Fans Constantly Ask Him

That ’90s Show is now streaming on Netflix, and the show stars Debra Jo Rupp and Kurtwood Smith as their fan-favorite That ’70s Show characters, Red and Kitty Forman. It’s been nearly 17 years since the original sitcom came to an end, and the new series reveals where many of the beloved characters ended up. Despite how much time has passed between the shows, Smith recently revealed to Collider that he still gets a request from fans. According to the actor, guys often come up to him and ask him to call them a dumbass.

“Amazingly, a lot,” Smith revealed when asked how often people ask him to call them Red’s favorite insult. “It’s just, it’s amazing to me that guys… Maybe one woman asked me to call her a dumbass, but pretty much it’s guys and they come up and they go, ‘Hey man, can you call me a dumbass?’ And what I used to say was, ‘Anybody who wants to be called a dumbass is a dumbass.’ And then I’d call them a dumbass, and they’d be happy. Yeah. But I don’t know why. I have no idea what that comes from. I think they feel that it kind of pulls them in, makes them a little tiny bit a part of the show.” 

During the interview, Rupp and Kurtwood also talked about that major differences between working on That ’70s Show and That ’90s Show.

“Well, for me, the difference [was] I already knew the character,” Rupp explained. “So in ’70s Show, we were all figuring out our characters. But going into this, I already knew Kitty, I knew who Kitty was, so I felt like I had a leg up. And with less episodes, that was very valuable because I didn’t have to do this, you know, waste four episodes doing investigating as to who she was. It was there from the beginning. That’s my answer.”

Smith added, “That was a good answer. That was really a good answer. What was the question again? Okay. Yeah. I think that, yes, before we were doing 25 episodes a season, we’re only doing 10 this time, but that was good, especially, I think, at the beginning. If we were trying to do 25 episodes, I think it would’ve run us all into the ground.”

He continued, “I think the fact that the writers, in particular, the creators of the show, Bonnie and Terry Turner and Gregg Mettler, all three of whom had worked on the previous show, they knew where to go. They also had a leg up, as opposed to having to develop all these things as it went along. If you go back and look at the beginning of That ’70s Show to see how much we changed, how much the show changed in the time that it was on the air. Here, they already knew what was going to work. They already knew that ‘dumbass’ was going to work, and they knew that Debora Jo was going to be able to laugh, and they had all these things going right from the beginning.”

That ’90s Show is now streaming on Netflix.