Debbie Allen discusses why Lisa Bonet left "A Different World" - EMMYTVLEGENDS.ORG

Well, you know, this was very interesting. When I first took over the show, one of the first things I did was meet Lisa Bonet and I loved her from The Cosby Show. She adored her and she hid from me that she was actually pregnant. she had married Lenny Kravitz and you know, I guess Bill had his feelings about it because he was possessive in a way, I mean, they were his wife and kids on camera, but they were still him, I mean the way they It was with Felicia. I mean, that's another story. She told me she was pregnant, so I said, "We'll listen to her.

We have to go tell her. So I said, honey. Put some shoes on. Don't go up there with your bare feet. Let's go get your best dresses. Comb your hair." and we're going to see him and we're going to tell him together so we got dressed we went up there and he could see us coming, he saw us a mile away, he could see us stop him and he said there he looked at us and I said, well, we have some things we want to tell you he He said what is it, you're pregnant and they said oh my God, he said what was so

different

about you, he looked at me, he said you're pregnant, your sister got pregnant and now what and me.

I told. I explained to her how I wanted to use it on the show because it would be cool to see an upper class girl have a baby without being married because she didn't want to get married and girls could. I supported her, I was explaining to everyone what we could do right, honey, that was just her fuming and she didn't know it, so he heard all that. They put me in places, the new person in charge we started talking about stories. and then immediately, maybe two or three weeks later, he says: you know what Debbie doesn't, she's pregnant Denise Huxtable isn't pregnant Lisa Bonet isn't pregnant, no Denise so no, no, you can't have it, you can't have it. let's do No, then he took I was so angry with him that he wanted to take her, but I understood that he just wanted her back.

I thought it would have been cool to see that story but she

left

us to go back home and then she ended up getting married on the show there and you know what happened there so she

left

the show and then I also had Marisa Tomei Marisa Tomei was the only white character on the show. That excited me because she was looking at it as the opposite of my own personal experience. She had been the only black child in a ballet school, the only black child in the unit. So what should that be like? Because when I went to Howard University we had a talented white student and that would be very interesting.

I cast a net. I hadn't even pitched the idea of ​​Dwayne Wayne bringing her home for Thanksgiving dinner and her mother being furious because there's a white girl and she has, oh you know, let's look at the other one, you know the other side of racism. because it goes both ways, let's be clear, it goes both ways, so we couldn't do that.