Judith Light ‘learned so much’ from Tony Danza on ‘Who’s the Boss?’ despite initially looking ‘down on’ sitcoms

nypost.com:

“Who’s the Boss?” with Tony Danza. Light, 75, spoke about her experience working with Danza, 73, during a roundtable at TheWrap’s Power Women Summit 2024 in Beverly Hills on Tuesday.

Sitting alongside Kathryn Hahn, Kali Reis and June Squibb, the Emmy Award-winning actress reflected on saying she’d “never do a soap opera” or a sitcom.“This keeps haunting me,” Light said of her past remarks. “And, of course, I did both of them,” she added.

Light got her big break on the soap “One Life to Live” before starring on the popular ’80s sitcom “Who’s the Boss?”Light explained that soaps and sitcoms were “things I looked down on — which is what it really was.”She continued, “That was on me; that was pejorative and discouraging and disproportionate to the work that was actually being done.“These people are working so hard to do an hour of television every single day,” she said of soap opera actors.“I’m going, ‘I don’t want to be a part of this, I don’t want to be a part of this.’ It’s like, ‘Who are you?’ And it really was transformational for me in relation to who I was being in the world.”While Light thought she had rid herself of her “pejorative” attitudes toward certain types of projects after working on “One Life to Live,” she came face to face with them again when she was cast on “Who’s the Boss?” viewing the sitcom as beneath her.“I thought I’d learned my lesson and then I went, ‘No, actually you haven’t learned it.

So go and look at it again,'” she recalled.But humility wasn’t the only thing she would learn from working on the hit show.“I learned so much about comedy and timing from Tony Danza.