Susan Olsen ‘Almost Died’ Filming ‘The Brady Bunch’ Pilot

Susan Olsen’s Cindy Brady is a survivor.

On the April 22 episode of The Real Brady Bros podcast, Olsen, 63, spoke about The Brady Bunch’s very first episode, titled “The Honeymoon,” alongside on-screen siblings Barry Williams, Christopher Knight and Mike Lookinland. They men played Greg, Peter and Bobby Brady, respectively, on the series.

In the episode, which aired in September 1969, viewers see Florence Henderson’s Carol and Robert Reed’s Mike tie the knot and go on their shenanigans-filled honeymoon. During the podcast episode, Williams, 70, noted that in one scene, there was “the biggest close-up I have ever seen to this day” on the “adorable face of Cindy Brady.” He added that it almost looked like the camera had trouble focusing on her.

But Olsen shared that actually this close-up was blurry because she “got injured” on set and they were trying to hide her bruised and swollen face. “I almost died,” she said, to the surprise of her costars. 

She remembered that they were shooting something on the set they used for the girls’ bedroom. “ I was getting body makeup on my legs,” she said. “I was standing on a makeup chair and something from the catwalk, where they keep all the lights and everything, fell. It hit the makeup man first, [bounced] off the body makeup woman, and hit me in the face.” She was stunned that her cast members didn’t know about this. 

“If you look at the [wedding] ceremony, and you see the three girls on one side, if you were to zoom in really tight, you can see my face is quite swollen,” Olsen, who would have been around 8 at the time, said. “I look different. You can even see it in some of the early publicity shots.”

After she was injured, she went to her mother and sat on her lap for comfort. Henderson, who died in 2016 at 82, was there and got upset on Olsen’s behalf. “Florence is going, ‘That hit that little girl really hard.’ And everybody’s going, ‘No. She’s fine,’ ” she said.

Olsen remembered, “I swear I thought, ‘I don’t wanna be brave, and I want to cry. In fact, I don’t just want to cry. I want to sob. I’m just gonna let go and forget all my pride and just sob because this hurts.’ ”

But right before she let herself cry, the episode’s director, John Rich, came over and told her, “You are such a brave little girl.”

“And I was like, yeah, okay, I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to cry. I’m going to be a brave girl,” she said.

“The saddest news is that we didn’t sue Paramount because I would have made more off of that than the show,” Olsen added. The next day, she came into work with “two black eyes” and a “swollen” nose and face and Henderson made sure that the producers saw her, since “everybody was trying to say, ‘It didn’t really hit her. She’s fine.’ ” 

But Olsen’s memories of the accident weren’t totally negative.

“I remember loving it because I looked like I was in a horror film,” she said. “And then everybody knew, yes, I had gotten hurt, and I had gotten hurt very badly.”

Production called in makeup artist Hal King, who had done Lucille Ball’s makeup, to cover Olsen’s injuries. Olsen was “thrilled” since Ball was her idol. “And every day my bruises would be a different color,” she remembered.