“The relationship between the adult and child actors on the set can be strained,” he wrote.
It can be difficult for actors to get along with their costars, but what happens when that costar is barely ten years old?
According to his memoir, And Jerry Mathers as the Beaver, Jerry Mathers explained that while he was a child star commonly working with a group of adults, they weren’t always on the best of terms. Mathers is best known as Theodore Cleaver of Leave It To Beaver. Mathers explained that while he looked up to plenty of the adults on set, like his on-screen parents, their relationship was professional.
“Although all the adult actors on Leave It to Beaver liked the kids on the show, it was not true family-type affection,” Mathers wrote. “They were paid professional actors. We were paid professional actors. We all knew that our real family and friends were somewhere else waiting for us to come home. There lies the problem.”
Occasionally, due to the time commitments that working on the set of Leave It to Beaver required, there were moments that Mathers believed favored the children on set.
“The relationship between the adult and child actors on the set can be strained,” he wrote. “It is not a personal thing, but more of a professional reality. Children must, according to law, be off the set by 5 P.M., and they must go to school during the day. Adult actors must work around the children’s schedule, even if that means that they sit on a set with nothing to do for hours and then work until midnight. The adults had to be back at the studio at the same time the following morning, regardless of the hours they had worked the previous night.”
That meant many adult actors on set were at the mercy of Mathers’ schedule, which could sometimes be trying. It’s a situation in which Mathers seemed to sympathize more with the adults on set than the children, in retrospect.
“Hugh Beaumont, Barbara Billingsley, Richard Deacon, and others were our coworkers and were nice to us based on that professional relationship,” he wrote. “They never complained to us about having to work around us for seven years, but now looking back, I realize how frustrating it must have been for them. When we were home tucked in our beds, they were still filming, drinking coffee to stay awake.”
