‘The Conners’ Star John Goodman Makes Sad Revelation About Relationship With Roseanne Barr

John Goodman revealed he has not spoken to Roseanne Barr in years—and doubts she’d ever want to speak with him again. The Conners star, 73, made the sad revelation in a July 2025 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, admitting that he did not reconnect with his TV wife about the ending to the Roseanne spinoff series in April.

“No,” the actor said when asked about Barr. “I’d rather doubt if she wants to talk to me. We haven’t talked for about seven or eight years.”

Of first working with Barr on the Roseanne show in the late 1980s, he said, “We hit it off from jump street. She made me laugh, and I made her laugh, and wow, it was so much fun. We’d get so many viewers for the show back then — 20, 30 million people. Things are so different now, but it was a special time.”

The Conners spinoff was created after a 2018 Roseanne revival was cut short when Barr was involved in a racist Twitter scandal. Her famous character, whom she played from 1988 to 1997 on the original ABC sitcom and then for one season in a 2018 reboot, was killed off of the series. The rest of the cast enjoyed a seven-season run with the spinoff.

“I didn’t think [the Roseanne reboot] was going to go beyond the initial five or six episodes,” Goodman admitted. “I thought it’d be a one-off thing, and then we got picked up, and Roseanne got fired. I thought that was it. … Then we got to do the show again as The Conners. I didn’t know how long it would last, but I sure enjoyed it while I was there.”

Barr has hinted at her issues with Goodman. In an interview with The Daily Mail, she alleged that the actor refused to back her when she suggested his character should be a Republican supporter to take the focus off of her own political leanings. “John refused. It fell to me. I looked like a crusader,” Barr claimed in the interview.

In June, Barr, 72, confirmed that she was not in contact with anyone from her longtime TV family. In addition to Goodman, the Roseanne cast included Laurie Metcalf, Lecy Goranson, Sara Gilbert, and Michael Fishman.

"No, I'm not friends with none of them. They're all in the past,” Barr told Fox News Digital in June. “We don't talk.”

While she noted that she doesn’t “hold any bitterness“ against her former co-stars, the Roseanne alum added, “They f---ed it all up with their greed and ridiculous stupidity to f--k all that up. F--k them, but I wish them well.”

Related: Roseanne Barr Makes Bold Claim About Guest Role on ‘The Conners’