Jaleel White experienced various problems behind the scenes as a child star on the sitcom Family Matters. Developing the nasally vocal tone of nerdy character Steve Urkel put a strain on his voice. Older castmates Reginald VelJohnson and Joi Marie Payton reportedly considered White difficult to work with. 

During his time on the hit 1990s show, White had another issue as he went through puberty. In his debut memoir, Growing Up Urkel, the 47-year-old actor recalled that show executives recommended that he wear looser-fitting pants to conceal his “bulge” as he became older, per an excerpt from The Sun.

“Let's get rid of the suspenders. Lower his pants, too,” White recalled hearing. “Oh, and...It's getting a bit uncomfortable watching him in tight jeans. There's a, uh...bulge.”

It was so tough for White to continue wearing Urkel’s jeans that he had begun “peeling” out of them “like a banana.”

The ill-fitting costumes and “physically painful” way that White had to speak in the Urkel voice was possibly enough for him not to agree to a Family Matters reboot. Instead of duplicating the success of Full House spinoff Fuller House, White pitched a post-Family Matters storyline that paralleled his own childhood, where the main character was seen “growing up on a studio lot and in public school at the same time.”

“That, to me, was the greater story that needed to be told for today,” he explained.

White recalled being told that no one had “interest” in his “memoirs.”

“But here we are 12 years later, and I think there's some people that might be interested in those memoirs,” White concluded.