Maybe those curls were a little too tight.
Susan Olsen, the 63-year-old actress forever known as Cindy Brady on The Brady Bunch, knew right from the start that her character was, as she and her costars Barry Williams (Greg), Christopher Knight (Peter), and Mike Lookinland (Bobby) put it on a very special episode of The Real Brady Bros, “stupid.”
The pronouncement began kindly enough when Williams — who has been cohosting the rewatch podcast with Knight for three years — remarked that of all the actors on the show, Olsen was the least like her character.
He complimented her for being bright and then joked about her first gag in the pilot episode: Carol (Florence Henderson) is prepping for her wedding that day to Mike (Robert Reed) and says she has butterflies in her stomach, causing Cindy to ask, “Did you sleep with your mouth open, Mommy?”
Remarkably, Olsen remembered the line all these years later, and performed it with a little extra “isn’t this ridiculous?” spin.
“You’re saying the most idiotic thing imaginable,” Williams remarked.
Knight asked, “Did it start there, Susan? Do you remember having an issue with that line?”
“Oh yeah!” she fired back.
Lookinland, who is nothing but entertaining on this podcast appearance, then presumed to speak what Olsen was thinking back then: “Why is Cindy so stupid?”
CBS via Getty
Cindy Brady, looking perplexed as usual
“I was 7, but that’s just how my career was,” Olsen sighed. “It was something I had to accept.”
She continued, “It was really emphasized when my son was old enough to start watching the things I was in. He was watching me in a Disney movie [The Boy Who Stole the Elephant] — I have this line [as] I’m looking at Mark Lester, the British young actor: ‘Why does he talk funny?’ My brother in the movie says ‘because he’s English,’ and I say, ‘What’s English?’ My son said, ‘So you always play the stupid child!'”
While Olsen added her mother always told her “it’s cute,” the actress said she was glad The Brady Bunch aired on Fridays “because at least the kids [at school] have a whole weekend to maybe forget about all the stupid things Cindy did while she was in my body on TV.”
Perhaps hoping to cheer her up, Knight said, “It’s forgivable because you do look like a live doll. Your face is to be sculpted.”
Olsen replied, “Aw, she doesn’t have a functioning brain, but she’s cute!”
Peacemaker Williams chimed in, “Well, it also takes intelligence to deliver a line to get the laugh,” a comment Olsen appreciated until… Lookinland had to mess things up by saying that in that early scene “it seems like Carol’s actually in on it. She gives Cindy a look like, ‘Oh, poor [girl] there she goes again. Oh, my my.'”
Bobby Bank/Getty
‘Brady Bunch’ star Susan Olsen at the 2025 Chocolate Expo in Edison, N.J.
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Check out the strangely compelling 90 minutes of four-way banter on the latest episode of The Real Brady Bros, which you can listen to below.
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