Step by Step'sJosh Byrne Left Child Stardom Behind for Renaissance Fairs and Other 'Nerd Stuff'

Mar. 15, 2025

Josh Byrne in 1993 and now.Photo:ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images; Josh Byrne Facebook

ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images; Josh Byrne Facebook

Byrne was just 6 years old when he joined the cast of the hit sitcom in 1991. However, when the show jumped from ABC to CBS in 1997, he didn’t return for its seventh and final season. Instead, he returned to school where, he told Keanan and Lakin, he briefly pursued “behind-the-camera kind of stuff.”

ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty

But, Byrne said, his interest in filmmaking didn’t last through high school. Instead, he “fell in love with” history. He also found himself “very much getting into the nerd things that I was into as a kid and just kept going.”

“They always had a bunch of the comics on set, like comic books and stuff,” he recalled. “When they had the boys' room, they had the nerd stuff … So I got into that pretty heavy.”

“He got me into a few different characters, which led me to Deadpool,” Byrne said. “He very much was the cool uncle. He very much was that. Like, I think we got very fortunate with the cast of how tight of a family we got. And, yeah, Patrick Duffy shaped a lot of my adult humor and a lot of — for better or for worse, my wife can vouch for that.”

Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

In a roundabout way, Mitchell was also responsible for Byrne’s enduring love of and involvement with Renaissance Fairs.

“You remember how he did all the martial arts and stuff?” Byrne asked Keanan and Lakin. “Because of him and my stepdad at the time, they got me into Taekwondo. The Taekwondo got me tied into various sword fighting groups, which got me tied into doing the Renaissance Fairs for years — going to the Renaissance Fairs and actually being one of the performers and the fighting and doing all this, just being silly and having fun with it.”

Byrne, who now works for action figure and statuette manufacturer Sideshow Collectibles, explained that performing in Renaissance Fairs is a lot like acting. “But we take time to teach as well,” he said. “So one of the guilds that I was a part of, we had a fake tavern we would build, and we would teach people about the histories of how taverns and things worked from the Renaissance.”

source: people.com