Family Matters dad Carl Winslow, who was played by Reginald VelJohnson, famously wore a cop uniform, but he sure spent a lot of time at his Chicago residence. Even cast members noticed.
“Girl, I want to talk to you about your daddy, who, apparently, is working from home all the time,” actress Telma Hopkins, who played Aunt Rachel, said to Kellie Shanygne Williams (Laura) on a recent episode of their Welcome to the Family rewatch podcast. “I mean, why is he always at home?”
Both actresses were part of the family sitcom that aired for nine seasons, from 1989 to 1998.
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Williams replied, “At least he’s got his uniform on at home. Maybe he’s just policing the house.”
Not that the house needed much help. Their adventures were, like the shows that aired before and after, such as Full House, Just the Ten of Us, and Dinosaurs, more wacky than law-breaking.
“Yeah, well,” Hopkins added, “he needs to go police somewhere else. Him and the horse he rode in on.”
Carl Winslow was quite fond of order and rules. (Don’t even get him started on Steve Urkel!)
The cast of ‘Family Matters’.
Craig Sjodin/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty
VelJohnson had some practice over the years playing cops, not only on Family Matters but in the movie Die Hard, where he was the cop who helped Bruce Willis’ John McClane through his hellacious night at Nakatomi Plaza in Los Angeles. In all, VelJohnson has played a policeman eight times, according to a July 2016 story in U.S. News & World Report.
“My entire career is based on playing officers of the law: Die Hard, Turner & Hooch, Family Matters, a couple TV movies,” he said. “I have this image of being this upstanding kind of guy, which is not a bad image to have – I’d rather have that.”
He added, “It’s a strange direction my career has taken. People in public will sometimes say, ‘Are you a real cop?’ I don’t know if it’s something about me or my girth that’s cop-like, but I make it very clear to people in the public that I’m not.”
VelJohnson said he didn’t know anything about cops when he began playing them.
“I used my good sense and did the best I could,” he said. “What I brought to the image was a human-ness, a familiarity that cops don’t usually have in terms of their image. He was at work but also a human being, a father, a husband.”
He continued, “Do you ever think of what cops do after work? They’re just like us: They have bad days, they have good days, they have happiness, they have sadness. The amazing pressure of having to deal with the public in a life-or-death situation – that must be an incredible thing to do on a daily basis. So you take all that, you have a complex characterization.”
VelJohnson, Hopkins, and Williams were all part of Family Matters until its final episode aired on July 17, 1998.
Listen to the women’s full conversation above.
