After the news broke that Cameron was behind Julie’s firing, she was stripped of her title of Azalea Festival Queen in Wilmington, NC when a local televangelist petitioned for a boycott of the festival if she were crowned queen.
“It wasn’t the title I cared about, but I feel like I have some kind of scarlet letter on. I’ve been bombarded by people saying I’d be a bad role model for children,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of it, but it’s not something I’d ever do again.”
Asked by Kerwin if she’d seen Cameron since he demanded her firing, Julie said, “I bumped into him one time and he wouldn’t even look at me. It was the creepiest thing.”
The unanswered question: Why did it take Cameron so long to realize that Julie had posed in Playboy? She never attempted to hide her modeling experience and she was hired for “Growing Pains” four years after her initial nude pictorial appeared in the magazine.
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Classic TV Beauties 1980s Countdown
JULIE McCULLOUGH as Julie Costello in "Growing Pains"
For one brief season the beautiful blonde was a rising star in the TV world. Playing a nanny for the Seaver family and love interest to Mike (Kirk Cameron) on the hit show, Julie's career appeared to be skyrocketing.
Even though Julie had previously been an unknown actress and she had appeared in only eight episodes during the 1989-90 season, there was talk that a new storyline would result in a wedding for Julie and Mike.
Unfortunately, Julie’s meteoric rise ended as quickly as it began. When Cameron learned that Julie had appeared nude in Playboy magazine and had been a Playmate of the Month, the recent born-again Christian accused the show’s producers of promoting pornography and demanded that she be terminated. The producers complied with Cameron’s wishes and Julie was unceremoniously dumped.
“Growing Pains” was Julie's first big break in Hollywood, so she was understandably shattered.
“I was heart broken,” she told www.hollywoodchicago.com “I was written off the show very abruptly because I had posed in Playboy and I was very upset about it. But I had no backbone at the time, I wouldn’t talk about it publicly or to anyone in the press. I just cried to my friends about it. I have good friends and good family.”
“It was bad for his image is what I was told,” Julie said when she appeared on “The John Kerwin Show" in 2007. “It was never officially said to my face, but he became a born again Christian and instead of throwing stones it was boulders. Sometimes people get on a path and they want to save the world. but instead they want to oust people instead of embracing and loving them."
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Producer Dan Guntzelman told People in a 1989 article that Kirk’s character was “ripe for a lady of substance.” He acknowleged he “wasn’t fond of the publicity because we’re committed to a Midwest perspective on our show,” but admitted, “Despite all this, using Julie is not stretching it that much. If you start knocking out actresses who have appeared in the buff, there will be a lot of all-male shows on the air.”
Born in Honolulu, Julie grew up the step-daughter of a Marine and she lived all over the world. She spent her high school years in Missouri and Texas. Julie said she entered numerous beauty pageants, and although she never won, she took home many Miss Photogenic awards.
In 1984 when Playboy approached her to appear in a “Girls of Texas” pictorial, her parents originally told her that she wasn’t allowed to pose for the magazine. “But then they said I was old enough to make my own decisions and that this would give me some money that they couldn’t.”
Julie graced two Playboy covers in 1985 and 1986, and was named the Playmate of the Month in February 1986, appearing as the magazine’s centerfold. She eventually appeared on the cover of Playboy four times.
More recently, Julie has become a standup comedian, branding herself as the “Funny Bunny.” Julie said her comedy “comes out of the realness of being an aging pin-up gal.”
"It just happened so fast,” she told Kerwin. “I'm 19 years old and the next thing you know I'm on the cover of Playboy and the next thing you know I'm the centerfold and the next thing you know I'm moving to Hollywood and I'm on TV. I hardly had time to think about it."
She recalled her experiences of staying at the Playboy Mansion in the Kerwin interview.
"It was strange. I remember walking into the Grotto not knowing what it was. It looked like a big ole well to me,” she said. “When I lived in West Virginia there were grottos in the caves. I did not know what it was. The strangest people go to the Grotto.You did not want to go to the Grotto at a party. I just think Cootyville."
Julie, the tutorial voice for the video game “Playboy: The Mansion,” added that Mr. Playboy, Hugh Hefner, “never hit on me. I don’t know if I should be proud of that or not.”
