Nostalgia
‘Leave It to Beaver’ Star Got the Role After Saying He’d Rather Be at Cub Scouts
Jerry Mathers landed the iconic role of Beaver Cleaver on ‘Leave It to Beaver’ by choosing his Cub Scout meeting over his final audition.
Nearly seven decades ago, on October 4, 1957, the iconic series Leave It to Beaver premiered on CBS. The show starred Jerry Mathers as Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver, Tony Dow as his older brother, and Barbara Billingsley and Hugh Beaumont as their parents, June and Ward. Mathers was only 8 at the time he landed the role, and during the final audition he was blunt about not wanting to be there. His honesty landed him the part.
In a 2010 Foundation Interviews chat, Mathers talked about auditioning for Leave It to Beaver. He explained that in this case, it was a “cattle call” audition, and he didn’t typically go on those types of auditions. However, he had a new agent who was “very, very high on television series.”
The initial round of auditions had about 5,000 young actors there, and for six to eight weeks, the group was slowly whittled down. When the call came for what would be the final round, Mathers admitted, “I was a little tired of it. I didn’t like just sitting out there with all these kids, and I’d rather go out and play after school.”
Just before that final audition, Mathers joined the Cub Scouts, and his first activity was scheduled to happen on the same day. This time, he was told, it was down to about 10 kids, so whether he got the role or not, they were almost to the finish line.
Mathers told his mom he simply couldn’t go to the audition because it conflicted with his Cub Scout meeting. They decided he’d wear his Cub Scout uniform to the audition, hoping they could make it to both the audition and the meeting.
He recalled he was the last of the boys to be called in, and he was “just really jittery.” The producers asked Mathers what was wrong and why he was so jittery, wondering if he didn’t want to be there. He told them, “No, I want to go to my Cub Scout meeting.”
They told him he could leave, and his mother was curious why he was done so quickly. He told her, “Well, they asked me if I wanted to be here; I said no, and they said I could leave.”
Mathers’ mom was pretty anxious about how her son had handled that. However, later that night, “They called and said that I had the job as the Beaver in a new pilot, and the reason I got the job is that they would rather have a kid that wanted to go to a Cub Scout meeting [than] be an actor.
As Entertainment Weekly notes, Mathers is the last of the Cleaver family still alive now. Although he kept acting for years, fans will always remember him as his Leave It to Beaver character.
