Costar support! Alyssa Milano found out about her on-screen bestie Danny Pintauro’s HIV confession the same way as the rest of America. When the 39-year-old’s interview with Oprah Winfrey aired late last month, making national headlines, Milano, 42, was completely in the dark.
“It was absolutely heartbreaking,” the new Atkins spokeswoman tells Us Weekly of hearing that her Who’s the Boss? costar has been HIV positive for 12 years.
Pintauro recently expressed remorse about his decision not to tell Milano in an exclusive video interview with Us.
“I was in contact with Tony [Danza] and Judith [Light] beforehand, they knew,” Pintauro said of his costars. “So they were already lending their support. I wasn’t in contact with Alyssa [Milano] and I regret that now. I really should have let her know beforehand because she got just as shocked as everybody else.”
Milano had an emotional appearance on The Talk where she lent her full support to Pintauro, and since then the pair have gotten back into each other’s lives.
“Yeah, since being on The Talk we’ve reconnected, which has been awesome. We’ve been texting every day, and I’m very grateful for that, but, you know, also sad that it took this to bring us back together,” Milano tells Us. “When we ended the show there were no cell phones, there were no computers, there was no Internet, so it would have been a more difficult time to keep in touch. But he’s always — all those people from that show are always in my heart, always. They’re a part of me on like a cellular level. You know, and he’s going to do great things now!”
Milano and Pintauro played Samantha and Jonathan, the children of Danza’s Tony and Light’s Angela, respectively, on the sitcom that ran from 1984 to 1992.
