When Sons of Anarchy premiered this week, it brought back TV’s most hardcore mother. Gemma Teller is a role that actress Katey Sagal seems born to play, though it’s the opposite good/bad mother of Peg Bundy, her similarly iconic role on the long-running sitcom Married With Children. If you’ve ever wondered what it’d be like if Jax Teller and Bud Bundy shared the same air, it happened this week in Los Angeles (sort of), as Sagal was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and her Married With Children cast reunited to honor their former co-star.
After a brief speech from FX Networks CEO John Landgraf, actors Ed O’Neill, Christina Applegate and David Faustino took the stage to share a memory or two about their history with Sagal. Predictably, O’Neill makes a marriage joke right away about the rarity of someone in Hollywood saying something nice about their ex-wife. (Cue studio audience laughter.) He recalls the show by bringing up his and Sagal’s chemistry and saying he never laughed as hard in his life. Take that, Modern Family!
“None of us thought we’d get out of there,” joked Christina Applegate, referring to the Fox series’ eleven seasons on the air. She glorifies Sagal’s physique, which she said has only gotten better since they first met, when a 15-year-old Applegate thought Sagal had the greatest “white t-shirt and jeans” body she’d ever seen. As well, the younger actress speaks highly of her TV mother’s matronly ways through all those years, admitting she saw her work family more than her real one.
Faustino doesn’t say much other than Sagal has always been an inspiration for him. It was quite amusing when Hollywood Chamber of Commerce President Leron Gubler was announcing their names, as he wasn’t quite sure if Faustino was going to also say something or not. The way he says “Is David coming up, still?” is classic.
Here’s the crew together again in still form, just in case you didn’t want to watch the video from Variety.
“Over the years as I’ve done my job,” Sagal says during a particularly poignant stretch of her acceptance speech, “I’ve realized more and more that my job is a service job. As actors, we help others to access their emotions. We make people laugh and cry and wonder and remember, and feel their big feelings. We help great storytellers to tell their stories. And of course, we help to sell soap.”
What’s your favorite Peg Bundy memory? Hopefully it wasn’t “when she briefly mothered that kid Seven that disappeared without a trace.”
