Never meet your heroes — or Tim Allen, that is. Few things are quite as unpleasant and soul-crushing as finding out that an actor you’ve adored is a total d**k in real life. And rest assured, the silver screen Santa Claus that we Millennials used to cherish and laugh at growing up has done a lot to obliterate our immature fandom and warrant our utmost contempt instead. Case in point: /Film’s BJ Colangelo previously wrote about a story that involved Allen being a prick to his co-star Rene Russo on the set of Barry Sonnenfeld’s dark comedy “Big Trouble” (and it was far from the only time Allen caused trouble during filming, according to the movie’s director).
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But even if you set aside Allen essentially calling Russo “unattractive” to her face, he has a long history of engaging in problematic behavior throughout his career with his co-stars and other celebrities. One of the most scathing of those comes from actor, comedian, and screenwriter Casey Wilson, who worked with Allen on the Disney+ TV show “The Santa Clauses” in 2022. Indeed, in a 2023 episode of her podcast, “B***h Sesh: A Real Housewives Breakdown” (via Variety), Wilson didn’t hold back and ripped the “Home Improvement” star apart for his rude and pompous conduct after he treated her (and, frankly, everyone around them) poorly during the shooting of the “Santa Clauses” pilot.
Tim Allen made everyone on the Santa Clauses set ‘frantic’
Wilson went into detail to explain why working with Allen “was the truly single worst experience” she’s ever had with a co-star. In her scene with the actor, Wilson’s character was supposed to throw things at him because she thought that Allen’s Scott Calvin was breaking into her house in the middle of the night. Of course, we know better than to the “Santa Clause” movies, but the whole point and joke of the bit is that Wilson’s character doesn’t. She’s just following the script, but Allen, apparently, didn’t think she was doing it right. As Wilson recalled:
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“So I’m throwing things at him. [He] goes over to the producer who is standing four feet from me and goes, and I hear him, he goes, ‘You gotta tell her to stop stepping on my lines.’ The producer turns to me with horror on his face and has to walk one foot to me and he goes, ‘Um, Tim would ask that you stop stepping on his lines.'”
As Wilson described it, the entire cast and crew were quite scared of the star and felt pretty uncomfortable around him because he never made eye contact with anyone else and was generally audacious. (Everybody on set “just looked frantic,” to quote Wilson directly.) But there’s more! After finishing another scene where Wilson was involved, Allen immediately yelled that he was leaving without notice, dropped his costume on the floor, and rushed out of the set. The funniest part of all this? One of the members of the “Santa Clauses” crew apparently told Wilson this contentious and obnoxious behavior was actually Tim Allen “on a good day.” Go figure.
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