Scott Weinger made a name for himself in the ’90s as Steve Hale, D.J. Tanner’s goofball boyfriend, on the beloved sitcom Full House (and later, the Fuller House revival), and as the voice of Aladdin in Disney’s classic animated movie. But for the past two decades, Weinger — now 50 — has mostly closed the book on acting, quietly working behind the scenes as a television writer and producer in his main day job. His latest credit? Hulu’s sci-fi post-apocalyptic thriller Paradise.
Transitioning from child actor to TV writer was a trajectory Weinger didn’t fathom his Hollywood career taking. “I never could have planned any of it,” Weinger tells Yahoo. “I knew I wanted to give writing a try, screenwriting specifically, but I didn’t know exactly what I was aspiring to do.”
A chance opportunity in 2003 led Weinger into Paradise creator Dan Fogelman’s orbit, landing him his first writing job as an assistant on Fogelman’s first series, a WB sitcom called Like Family that starred Holly Robinson Peete. Weinger went on to collaborate with Fogelman on two ABC shows, the alien comedy The Neighbors and musical satire Galavant, before settling into Paradise. The latter came to fruition after Fogelman, then deep into This Is Us, sent an email to Weinger — who had returned to acting to reprise the character of Steve on Fuller House — seeking his opinion on the then nascent project. It snowballed from there.
“I think Dan knows that I’m a curious person,” Weinger says of why he thinks Fogelman extended an olive branch despite his lack of writing experience in the dramatic TV space. (Weinger’s other writing credits include episodes of Privileged, 90210 and Black-ish.) “He probably knew that I would get excited theorizing about how the world will end. What is it like? How do you build a city in a bunker? All these nerdy questions. … He knew that I would be intellectually curious about all of these things.”
It’s panned out.
I always enjoyed being a kid actor. But after college, I didn’t feel excited about pursuing it as an adult.
Weinger is credited with writing one of Paradise’s most heartbreaking episodes of Season 1, which features a devastating character death. The episode he wrote in Season 2, which premiered on Hulu on Feb. 23, has been well-received. For Weinger, putting pen to paper became a motivating pursuit that has allowed him to flex muscles he never used before as an actor, living inside worlds he helped create and maintaining a semblance of a normal day-to-day routine.
“Writing TV shows is, for me, the sweet spot of getting to be super-creative but working with amazing people every day,” says Weinger, who has been married to veteran television writer Rina Mimoun since 2008. “It’s the most fun I could have professionally. It encompasses everything I like about the entertainment business.”
That’s not to say he didn’t find his time in front of the camera gratifying. It’s just that as he got older and as his interests shifted, his creative desires and professional goals also evolved.
“I always enjoyed being a kid actor. But after college, I didn’t feel excited about pursuing it as an adult,” Weinger says. “I enjoyed it more when it was my after-school job, when it was my side hustle. When it was my main thing, I wasn’t so excited.”
Weinger also understood the pitfalls that could come with fame. “I was one of those kid actors who was so obsessed with not being the former child actor [with] the sad story,” he says.
Weinger played D.J. Tanner’s boyfriend Steve on Full House.
(ABC Photo Archives via Getty Images)
It’s why he opted to go to college at the peak of his ’90s stardom. “People said I was crazy because they’re like, ‘Four years [away] is a long time.’ People would come up to me on set and say, ‘What are you thinking, man? You’re kind of on a roll.’ Other people were like, ‘Get out of here, dude. That’s the best thing you could possibly do. You’ll come back, nobody’s going anywhere.’ That’s not quite true. Leaving and trying to reestablish yourself is not exactly easy, but I wouldn’t change it.”
If there were one concern Weinger had, it was the risk of not being taken seriously by the industry because of his onscreen ’90s fame as he forged a new path forward. Rather than lean on his screen credits, he decided to do things “the traditional way,” he says. “I started, literally, by bringing somebody coffee and handing out scripts,” Weinger shares, crediting Fogelman for giving him — an unproven writer — a shot all those years ago. “I never wanted to be perceived as someone who was a dilettante about it who was dabbling in [writing].”
Now decades into writing, he’s loving it. But Weinger says it’s his teenage son, Mischa, who grew up on the set of Fuller House, who “always wants me to go back to acting.”
“He’s 16 now, and he has a much better sense of the industry as a whole [and] what I like to do. But when he was younger and when I was working on Fuller House, for him that was the most fun,” Weinger says with a laugh, remembering his then 9-year-old son’s experiences. “We’d come to tape nights, and it was like, ‘Watch Dad put on a play every week.’ And whenever we would leave the house, he would see people freak out over his dad because he’s on this hit TV show.”
Weinger and wife, Rina Mimoun, in 2018.
(Jean Baptiste Lacroix via Getty Images)
The Full House revival, which starred fellow original cast members Candace Cameron Bure, Jodie Sweetin and Andrea Barber, ran for five seasons on Netflix. “[Mischa] said to me, ‘What are you going to do when Fuller House is over?’ I said, ‘I think I’m going to go back to my real job. I’m going to go back to writing TV shows.’ And he goes, ‘Why? Acting on a TV show seems way funner,’” Weinger recalls. “He had a really good point. Maybe if someday they hit me up to do the reboot of the reboot…”
Weinger clarifies he hasn’t fully given up on acting; he just isn’t actively seeking roles out anymore — though being a part of Fuller House “did scratch an itch I didn’t know I had,” he says. “I loved it so much, I must have missed this more than I realized. So maybe in the future, it’d be cool [to act again].”
For now, Weinger is content with keeping his writer’s hat on; it’s been nearly six years since he last appeared on camera, though he still pops in for voice work here and there. He still keeps in touch with his Full House and Fuller House family, and his eyes brightened at the idea of dreaming up roles for them in Paradise or a future project he writes. (“I would love to work with them again,” Weinger says.)
He has his eye on tackling the spy genre next, something in the vein of John le Carré and The Bourne Identity, or working internationally, like he did for the French-language Netflix rom-com series Plan Coeur (The Hook Up Plan). “I got to be a writer in Paris, and I was writing in Hemingway cafes,” Weinger says of that particular experience. He and his son recently finished binge-watching The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, which was filmed in Spain and France, inspiring him to think outside the box for his next thing: “I’m looking for adventures now, rather than jobs.”
Lately, Weinger — who recently received his updated SAG card in the mail (“It said ‘member since 1985,’ which is 40 years!” he marvels — has started subscribing to his son’s surfer mentality when it comes to navigating the ebbs and flows of Hollywood.
“I’m always impressed by his patience, just sitting out there waiting for the right waves. And it really is such a perfect metaphor for working in this industry, because you just have to be patient and the next wave will come,” he says. “You never believe it’s going to come and then it does. The only way to really know this in your heart is to be around as long as I have.”
