GROWING PAINS star Ashley Johnson, who played Chrissy Seaver, recalled a scary moment on set when an armed man attempted to kidnap her.
She called the experience the “the craziest thing that happened on GROWING PAINS” in a conversation with her “Weird Kids” podcast cohost Taliesin Jaffe.
“Somebody had written in and said, ‘I am coming to set and I am going to bring a gun and I am going to murder some of the cast,’” Johnson remembered.
She starred on the wildly ’90s popular sitcom alongside Kirk Cameron and Alan Thicke.
Security wasn’t tight. Each cast member had a “little camper trailer” and would walk within five feet of the live audience to get to the studio. Typically, they exchanged pleasantries with the fans, but things took a frightening turn one day.
“So, I’m walking with my mom and then I just remember some guy hops out of the line and he grabs me and starts booking it,” Johnson said, later adding, “He had a gun.”
She joked that as a “polite kid,” she probably said to him as he ran “‘Who are you, sir? What is your name? I’m very pleased to meet you.’”
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Thankfully, even without metal detectors, the studio lot was like a “compound,” and security “wrestled him down” before he could exit with Johnson in tow.
“I just remember flying around in the air. I was clueless as to what was happening,” she said.
She remembered the adults talking to her after the incident — and shared what her real worry was.
“…they were like, ‘Are you okay? Are you okay?’ And I just said, ‘I just think I’m gonna be in trouble.’ And they were like, ‘Well, what are you gonna get in trouble for?’ And I was like, ‘He took one of my shoes,’” Johnson remembered. But it wasn’t her shoe. It was wardrobe’s.
“It was never seen again.”
The kidnapper “ended up clearly going to jail.”
GROWING PAINS ran from 1985–1992, following the “misadventures of a family with a home-business father and a journalist mother,” per IMDB.
Cameron, who played Mike Seaver, said the cast’s on-screen family bond extended into their real lives.
“We laughed and cried together, shared birthday celebrations, Christmas parties, holidays and worked together with the crew as a team to make a really special TV show,” he told TODAY shortly after Thicke’s death in 2016. “We weren’t just a TV family. In many ways, we were a real family.”
Thankfully Johnson’s story had a happy ending.
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