5 Celebrities You Forgot Guest Starred On Married... With Children

Sitcoms live and die by their core casts, but hiring the right guest stars is also a subtle art. "Married... with Children," one of the best sitcoms of the 1990s, had some memorable guest stars during its run, which came to an end after 11 seasons in 1997. The show follows Al Bundy (Ed O'Neill), his wife Peggy (Katey Sagal), and their two kids, Kelly (Christina Applegate) and Bud (David Faustino), as they go about their lives in Chicago.

The Bundys are very much a dysfunctional family, which wasn't the done thing with sitcoms when the show premiered in 1987. These dynamics and the crude humor frequently on display led to calls for boycotts, though, ironically, these calls ultimately functioned as free publicity for "Married... with Children," which gained viewers as a result. As well as new viewers, the Fox show attracted several great guest stars who you may have forgotten about.

The late TV legend Eric Dane, who died in 2026 aged just 56 from complications related to ALS, appeared in several big shows during his career. One of his first television roles was a guest spot in the 1995 "Married... with Children" episode "Radio Free Trumaine" which was supposed to function as a backdoor pilot for a college-themed spin-off series starring Dane and Andrew Kavovit alongside David Faustino's Bud Bundy.

The Season 9 episode follows Trumaine University students Oliver and Mark (Dane and Kavovit) who find themselves expelled by the dean of the college, former Bundy neighbor Steve Rhoades (David Garrison), after they claim that he got his new job through blackmail. Rhoades' ex-wife Marcy (Amanda Bearse) was also in the mix and would have featured in the spin-off had it been greenlit, but that never came to pass.

It's not a particularly well-liked episode (as its 6.8 IMDb rating proves) and the general consensus among fans is that they were right not to proceed with the planned spin-off. "Honestly, I don't know where they would go with this show. The plot didn't seem to have anything to build on from the first episode," one Redditor wrote, with another saying, "It would have lasted 4 weeks."

Keri Russell, who would go on to star in hits like "Felicity" and "The Americans," also had a part in "Radio Free Trumaine," the backdoor pilot episode that saw Eric Dane and Andrew Kavovit play college radio DJs who get expelled. This was far from Russell's first on-screen role. After debuting on Disney's "The All New Mickey Mouse Club" alongside future stars like Ryan Gosling, Justin Timberlake,  Christina Aguilera, and Britney Spears, she snagged a role in "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid" and then guest-starred on "Boy Meets World" and "Emerald Cove," all before her "Married... with Children" appearance.

In "Radio Free Trumaine," Russell plays Trumaine student April Adams, a pretty local girl who gets romantically entangled with a hunky Russian basketball star and Bud Bundy at the same time. She's also an intern at the bank that Marcy manages, which leads to complications when she joins the protest against Steve's decision to expel Mark and Oliver. In the end, she rejects the offer of a job at the bank so she can work with the boys on their radio show, which they get to continue after Steve backs down and reverses his decision to kick them out. She also rejects both Bud and the basketball player, choosing to remain single in a refreshing twist.

Just one year after making her debut as the sought-after Kelly Kapowski in "Saved by the Bell," Tiffani Thiessen made a guest appearance in a Season 4 episode of "Married... with Children." Thiessen (who was credited as Tiffani-Amber Thiessen at the time) was still a relative unknown at that point, but "Saved by the Bell" would soon catapult her and her castmates to stardom. Nowadays, it's easy to forget that she popped up in an episode of "Married... with Children" as a girl named Heather McCoy, one of Bud's former crushes.

The 1990 episode, titled "What Goes Around Came Around," has a solid 8.2 rating on IMDb. In it, Bud brings Heather to the Homecoming dance, but with nefarious intentions — he wants to get back at her after she ran his underwear up the middle school flagpole years prior. Thiessen's appearance here is a pretty fun one, as the arc of revenge is never smooth, and we see her and Bud go back and forth in a bout for the last laugh. It's a fun piece of TV that gave Thiessen the opportunity to play a mean girl, someone quite different from her "Saved by the Bell" character.

Before he was Seeley Booth, "Bones" alum David Boreanaz guest starred in an episode of "Married... with Children," 1993's "Movie Show." It was the actor's first professional television role and his first ever credited on-screen appearance (he had two small film roles that same year where he was uncredited).

This Season 7 episode centers around Christina Applegate's Kelly, who hits the movies with her parents and her brother after her boyfriend — Boreanaz's biker dude Frank — blows her off, and on her birthday no less. It's soon revealed that Frank is actually a no-good cheat when Kelly spots him at the movie theater with another girl. 

"Movie Show" boasts an impressive 8.4 IMDb rating. It's particularly memorable because of the scene in the cineplex where Kelly maturely handles the situation with Frank... only to then have Al beat him up in the back row. It proved to be a great springboard for Boreanaz, who went on to establish himself as a brooding heartthrob via "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and his beloved spin-off series "Angel."

15 years before Sue Sylvester terrorized the halls of William McKinley High School in "Glee," Jane Lynch was still trying to make a name for herself in Hollywood. She had played a few bit parts in films and television shows up until this point, but it was still the early days of her career when she secured a guest role in a 1994 episode of "Married... with Children" titled "Valentine's Day Massacre."

This Season 8 episode revolves around Bud discovering that an old crush named Crystal Brooks is now a famous pop singer, which leads to him attempting to reunite with her. He disguises himself as a bellhop to infiltrate the hotel she's staying at, which is where he encounters Lynch's character, a posh woman named Greta. Lynch has a great scene where she forces Bud to walk her wild dog for a cool $50.

Fans generally enjoy this zany episode, which has a solid 7.8 rating on IMDb. Lynch's signature comedic style was already fully formed by the time she played Greta, who provides some of the funniest moments in "Valentine's Day Massacre." The episode is named not just for Bud's rough journey trying to reconnect with his former crush, but also for Al's — he battles other husbands over a last minute gift for Peggy.