Scott Valentine, former ‘Family Ties’ actor, expresses regret about his character in the series

When it first aired back in 1982, the story of two radical parents who found themselves raising their four children in Reagan-American era became a huge hit almost overnight. Until this very day, the series Family Ties is considered an American classic.

Living as hippies during their youth, Steven and Elyse Keaton now have children who turned out just the opposite. Their eldest child, Alex, is into politics and a Reagan devotee, daughter Mallory is crazy about fashion, and Jennifer is into studying.

The series helped launch the careers of actors Michael J. Fox and Justine Batemen, among the rest, turning them into superstars.

One of the actors, however, revealed he wasn’t fond of the character he played in the series. Scott Valentine, who played Nick, the boyfriend of Bateman’s character Mallory, had his big breakthrough with Family Ties, but he ‘felt bad’ landing the role. The series gathered the attention of a huge number of fans, but as it turns out, Valentine himself wasn’t one of them.

Nick was portrayed as an off-beat young man with a huge heart but not the smartest.

Although it was initially planned for Nick to appear in a single episode, he stole the hearts of the fans and ended up being part of 45 episodes instead, playing ”the date that wouldn’t” leave.

The actor’s success as Nick Moore led to a spin-off series, The Art of Being Nick, which aired on NBC as a special on August 27, 1987. Sadly, the series never took off.

Despite the fame he reached with the show, Valentine confessed he hated the fact that Nick was portrayed as dumb.

”It was a big plus in terms of getting exposure. But very detrimental in people thinking that I was the monosyllabic idiot that I portrayed,” he told Santa Maria Times in 1992.

“It was a lot of fun, but literally there were times where I only had to utter two guttural utterances in a show and they paid me a bundle of cash for it,” he explained. “I felt bad at times.”

Today, Valentine doesn’t work as an actor but manages a hedge fund near his hometown of Saratoga Springs. Although the character he portrayed has been considered fan-favorite, the actor doesn’t look back on Nick with quite as much fondness. 

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