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It looks like Zack and Kelly weren’t the only item in Saved by the Bell.
Mark-Paul Gosselaar revealed that he and his former co-star Elizabeth Berkley once dated for a little bit. “You know how it is,” he starts telling Anna Faris on her Unqualified podcast on the Jan. 22 episode.
“When you’re working on a set, and we were young, there’s no one around really. I mean, you work and live in a bubble.”
He goes on to explain that he didn’t “have a lot of choices” when it came to working in L.A. and dating.
“You’re in L.A., right. You’re in your cars and you come to set and you do your work and you’re with these beautiful women and then you go back in your car…and you’re not going to school, so you don’t have a lot of choices.”
“People say, ‘Well didn’t you go out?’ Not really.” Adding that his mom drove him to work every day.
“All of us dated at one point or another—it was incestuous,” the actor told People in 2009 during the magazine’s 20-year reunion special.
NBC
Despite dating Elizabeth and his former cast mates, he admits that he was married at a very young age. He met his ex-wife, Lisa Ann Russell, when he was 19 and they tied the knot when he was 22-years-old. They were married for 14 years.
Now, he’s married to Catriona McGinn and they’ve been together for a little over six years. Gosselaar explains that he never really had a single period, and he never really wanted one. However, if he were dating, his biggest “deal-breaker” would be if a woman called him Zack Morris during sex. Noted!
It’s no secret that during his Saved by the Bell days, “MP” (he tells Anna that’s what he prefers to be called) was one of the biggest TV stars. However, the 44-year-old actor recalls that there was not really a way “to gauge how big you were,” especially since social media didn’t exist back then. Most young actors felt they “made it” when they were on the cover of Teen Beat or had mall sightings.
“It came to an abrupt end for me,” The Passage actor says.
Saved by the Bell started when he was only 12-years-old and ended when he was 19. He was paid a lot of money for the College Years spin-off of the hit show, and “that’s when I decided to become an actor,” he explains.
Once that was over, though, “it was two years of not knowing where my paycheck was going to come.” Gosselaar says he was detailing cars with his cousin, adding that it was important for him because he thought his s––t didn’t stink. The experience most definitely humbled him.
He credits NYPD Blue as jump-starting his career as an adult actor, and now he stars in the thriller series The Passage.
In his free time, he does enjoy the Funny or Die series Zack Morris is Trash. “If you really break it down, he did some really sh––tty things. And it’s funny if you’re a real, true fan.”
So now you have the tea: Gosselaar once dated Berkley and he never wants to be called Zack Morris during sex.