"Step by Step"'s" "Josh Byrne Left Child Stardom Behind for Renaissance Fairs and Other 'Nerd Stuff'

01/02/2025 03:01 PM

The former child actor explained how costar Sasha Mitchell's interest in comics and martial arts led him to Renaissance Fairs

After starring as youngest Lambert sibling Brandon in six seasons of Step by Step, former child actor Josh Byrne walked away from acting. But as he explained to former costars Christine Lakin and Staci Keanan on the latest episode of their podcast Keanan and Lakin Give You Déjà Vu, his time on the show definitely had a lasting impact on his present-day interest in all things "nerdy."

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."

"Patrick [Duffy] definitely fired some of that considering he started directing so many of the episodes, and I loved hanging with [Step by Step director Richard Correll]," Byrne, now 40, explained.

Related: Patrick Duffy Reveals the One Step by Step Plot Line He Pushed Back on: 'I Thought It Was Irresponsible'

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."

Keanan noted that Sasha Mitchell, who played dopey cousin Cody Lambert on Step by Step, was also very into comics. "I just remember he was so into the Punisher, and that was his thing, and he would be reading the comic books," she said.

"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."

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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."

"It's fun to still just go and be somebody else and have fun and be able to put that away when you're done and going back to regular," Byrne said. "It's a combination of, like, a bit of escapism, a bit of keep doing the acting and the performing and having fun and then going, 'Okay, cool. I had my fun. Back to work.' "