Cindy Brady Nearly Died While Filming First Episode of ‘The Brady Bunch’
The marriage of Mike Brady to Carol Tyler resulted in a merged family with six freaking kids, but if a plummeting piece of studio equipment had bounced a different way, it might have been five, according to Susan Olsen on this week’s episode of The Real Brady Bros podcast, per Entertainment Weekly.Olsen, who played Cindy, “the youngest one in curls,” almost didn’t survive the Brady Bunch pilot, she told her former co-stars Barry (Greg) Williams and Christopher (Peter) Knight. She was getting body makeup on her legs while a crew was filming a scene on an adjacent set. “I was standing on a makeup chair and something from the catwalk, where they keep all the lights and everything, fell,” she said. “It hit the makeup man first, off the body makeup woman, and hit me in the face.” Don't Miss POW! What an ominous introduction to show business. While the falling gear didn’t render Olsen unconscious, she was knocked around enough that her injuries were visible later in the episode when Carol and Mike exchange vows. “You can tell, if you look at the ceremony and you see the three girls on one side, if you were to zoom in really tight, you can see my face is quite swollen,” said Olsen. The mucky resolution of 1970s video makes “zooming in real tight” a blurry exercise, but “I look different. You can even see it in some of the early publicity shots. You can tell my face is a little swollen.” The falling hunk of equipment could have done even more damage had it hit the girl more squarely. Although TV mom Florence Henderson comforted her, Olsen couldn’t hold back tears. “I don’t just want to cry,” Olsen remembered. “I want to sob. I’m just gonna let go and forget all my pride and just sob because this hurts.” While Olsen shed tears after the accident, she says the injury wasn’t the worst part of that day. “The saddest news is that we didn’t sue Paramount, because I would have made more off of that than the show,” Olsen joked. One thing that wasn’t so funny: Word among the crew was that Olsen hadn’t been hit after all. When she arrived on set the next day, Henderson insisted that her real mom “make sure everybody sees her” — Olsen’s swollen face was proof that the previous day’s sobs weren’t the result of a scared kid being overdramatic.“My eyes were black. I mean, I had two black eyes. My nose was swollen. My face was swollen,” she said. “I remember loving it, because I looked like I was in a horror film. And then everybody knew, yes, I had gotten hurt, and I had gotten hurt very badly.”
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