Christopher Knight Says Parents Couldn’t Pay Rent Without His ‘Brady Bunch’ Checks
Life could have turned out differently for Christopher Knight if he hadn’t landed the part of Peter on The Brady Bunch. “Very, very different,” he said on the most recent episode of The Real Brady Bros. podcast. “Let’s just say that there was some experience of what family could be that I was exposed to because of the Bradys. And I wouldn’t have had that. In looking back on it, it was a great balancing agent in my life.”
Knight was alluding to a sense of domestic affection shared with his fictional family that wasn’t always part of his actual home life, at least according to other interviews he’s conducted in recent years. But when he said his life would have been “very, very different,” he was mostly talking about his family’s financial survival. “It chills me to even think” of the alternate future had he not been cast on The Brady Bunch, Knight said.
Barry Williams, who played Greg on the show, thought Knight was selling himself short. “Consider this, Chris,” he said. “As I look at you and your career and what you’ve done, you are an entrepreneur. You like to take big risks. You’re looking for the next Apple, the next Amazon, the next iPad. And I think you would have been a speculator as you have been with real estate, with Christopher Knight brands, with all kinds of different things that you’ve endorsed and put together.”
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Sure, Knight responded, he hopes that would have been the case. But Williams overlooked “some issues with getting to adulthood,” Knight explained. “I believe the Bradys helped us in our family. I mean, literally. There might not have been a way to exist where we were without some way of making those payments.”
Williams still didn’t quite get the point, suggesting that Knight’s experience and fame from the sitcom gave him a platform from which to build his entrepreneurship.
“No, no,” Knight replied. “It gave us the resources to pay the rent. My folks would not have existed much longer. It would have gotten to that point. And then there would have been all kinds of drift. Drifting where? I don’t know.”
That financial , says Knight, “got me to 18 and then eject.”
Knight has talked about his family’s money problems in the past, with an actor father who couldn’t land jobs and a mother who was a frustrated painter. Things got so bad that before Knight landed Brady Bunch, he said last year on the I Choose Me with Jennie Garth podcast, his father told his mother to make ends meet by feeding the children every other day. With no one holding down a steady job except Christopher, his home life was “chaotic and not abundant.”
“I just want to point out what a burden that is for a young teenager,” said Williams. “That’s tough.”
