‘Family Matters’ Star Jo Marie Payton Alleges Jaleel White Tried to Fight Her While on Set

Family Matters actress JoMarie Payton alleges she and co-star Jaleel White nearly got into an on-set altercation during the filming of the show’s ninth season.

The show’s star, who played matriarch Harriette Winslow during the show’s nearly decade-long run, told Entertainment Tonight that “there was one time he actually wanted to physically fight me,” referring to White, who played the show’s breakout and instantly recognizable character, Steve Urkel.

Payton, who said White “didn’t have the etiquette” on set that she and some other actors may have had, alleges that the incident took place while filming the tenth episode of season 9, “Original Gangsta Dawg.”

“There was something that he wanted to do and I said we can’t do that, standards and practices will not let that pass. It’s not gonna happen. He wanted to do it anyway,” she said. “He was so mad, he started kicking and screaming and stuff.”

That’s when Payton says “she walked off” but as she was doing so, she heard White make a remark, to which she says she asked costar Darius McCrary to clarify.

“He said something about, ‘She must want to melee.’ I said, ‘What’s a melee?’ He said, ‘a fight.’ I turned around — if he wanna fight, I would,” she told ET. “Darius [McCrary] grabbed me. I was gonna whip his behind.”

The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to White’s reps for comment.

The Urkel actor has previously suggested there were onset tensions between him and his Family Matters costars during the show’s run. During an interview with TV One’s Uncensored in 2021, White suggested that tension was due to him not being “welcomed to the cast at all.”

That reaction, according to several stars who appeared in an episode of E!’s True Hollywood Story, was about White’s character being elevated to a main character in the show. The actors were told by showrunners that the “dynamic was going to change” to make the show more about Urkel.

“And we said ‘OK,’” Payton said at the time. “We weren’t happy about it. I think along the way it got to be a little resentful but it was just an adjustment that we had to make.”

“My arrival to Family Matters was a rocky start at the beginning,” White said. “They kind of had to accept that I was there. That was a process.”

Eventually, though, the cast came around, he says. “Over time, figuring out that ‘if you do this and I do that, we win’ — that’s ultimately what evolved.”