While many fans had hoped that BET’s recent “Martin” reunion special could lead to a full-on reboot down the line, Tisha Campbell has made it clear that reviving the iconic series is probably out of the question at this point. The 53-year-old, who famously played Gina in the sitcom for all five seasons from 1992 to 1997, didn’t seem too convinced that a full-blown reunion would make sense, given that co-star Tommy Ford would not be part of the show.
Tommy died from a ruptured abdominal aneurysm in October 2016 at the age of 52, and given that he, too, had been a pivotal character in “Martin,” Tisha doesn’t know how rebooting the series would make sense from the perspective of a fan. “Tommy [Ford] is not with us, so that’s a little hard to say,” she told Entertainment Tonight at the 2022 BET Awards red carpet on Sunday.
They look so good! R.I.P Thomas Mikal Ford 🥺 pic.twitter.com/yFxnNFG2wm
— The V A U L T 🔥 (@_TooUnderratedX) June 17, 2022
“It really is too hard. We would miss him so much. Well, never say never, like Martin [Lawrence] says—but it’s just too hard to see ourselves without him.” The cast of “Martin,” including Tichina Arnold and Carl Anthony Payne II, dedicated their 30th anniversary BET reunion special, which aired on June 16, to Tommy, who portrayed the role of Tommy Strawn.
And while rebooting the sitcom for a full-blown TV revival, Tasha admitted that she’s often left wondering what her character would be up to today if the show was still running, quipping that Gina would’ve probably had a lot of babies with Martin by now. “We would have had a lot of kids. Lot of kids running around,” she told E! News’ Daily Pop earlier this month.
Also, in June, the former “My Wife And Kids” actress shed light on her friendship with Martin Lawrence today, having once filed a lawsuit against him in the ’90s as she accused him of “repeated and escalating sexual harassment, sexual battery, and verbal abuse.”
Things had gotten so bad between the two that although a settlement was reached out of court, Tisha was adamant that she filmed her remaining episodes of the final series without Martin in any of her scenes.
Martin touched on the allegations back in January 2020 while speaking to GQ, saying, “We don’t need to talk about something that just didn’t happen. So I just decided to walk away from the show. I just decided to end it. People said that I got canceled, but that wasn’t the case. I decided to just leave the show.”
And in her interview with CBS This Morning, Tisha said there was a lot of forgiving that needed to be done for both her and Martin to have been able to reconnect the way that they have. “We worked really hard to reconnect, to forgive and it’s really… this reunion is about a celebration of everything that we did, everything we accomplished, and our growth as human beings,” she told anchor Gayle King. “And so we concentrated mostly on that.”