Lookinland played youngest brother Bobby on the ’70s sitcom.

Brady Bunch star Mike Lookinland says he went ‘off the rails’ after the show ended

Lookinland played youngest brother Bobby on the '70s sitcom.

By Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt is a writer at **. She has been working at EW since 2024. Her work has previously appeared on Yahoo and in American *Journalism Review* and *The Shreveport Times*.

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March 31, 2026 6:35 p.m. ET

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Mike Lookinland on 'The Brady Bunch' in 1972. Credit:

Mike Lookinland needed a break after playing youngest brother Bobby on five seasons of the squeaky clean family sitcom *The Brady Bunch*. And he took it.

"I lived my childhood in my 20s, because I couldn't when I was a child," Lookinland said Monday on *The Real Brady Bros *podcast. "And in my 20s, I had a car and money and freedom. I was fully off the rails."

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The actor was all of eight when the sitcom premiered on ABC in 1969. When it ended five seasons and five years later, he was just beginning his teenage years.

"I'm just thankful that not every man, woman, and child had a high-def camera in their pocket when I was 25, like they do now," Lookinland said, "because it would have ruined my life."

Mike Lookinland in 2022.

Mark Von Holden/NBC via Getty

Christopher Knight, who portrayed middle brother Peter, said that their TV parents — actors Robert Reed, who played Mike, and Florence Henderson, the actress behind Carol — were a deterrent to the cast in behaving badly.

'We didn't wanna disappoint Florence and Bob," he said. "I mean, that was the beginning of it. It's like there's certain people that you just don't wanna disappoint. I think that was stronger with me with those two than it was my own parents."

And yet at least some bad behavior has come to light in the more than 50 years since the first incarnation of the Bradys went off the air. For instance, actress Maureen McCormick, who played elder sister Marcia, infamously wrote about struggling with drug addiction and an eating disorder in the years after the show.

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Lookinland and many of his costars were part of the show's many reunion projects, including the psychedelic *Brady Bunch Variety Hour *(1976-1977) and *The Bradys* series in the '90s. Other appearances, such as when he, Knight, and Barry Williams, who played eldest brother Greg, were on *The Masked Singer* in 2022, have been rare.

Lookinland married Kelly Wermuth in 1987, and the couple shares two children. He struggled with alcoholism, but said in 2013 that he had gotten sober.

He now leads a small business that makes decorative countertops, fireplaces, benches, and other concrete items.

Listen to the full conversation above.

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