Christopher Knight Reveals How He Was Lied To Ahead Of Shooting ‘Brady Bunch’ Scene With A Tarantula

Here’s the story… of some Brady Bunch on-set spider shenanigans!

Christopher Knight, who played middle son Peter Brady on the beloved family sitcom, stopped by TODAY on Thursday (Nov. 7) with fellow series alums Barry Williams, and Eve Plumb, where co-anchor Carson Daly reminded Knight of the show’s episode set in Hawaii.

“I know [it] was very popular, talked about a lot. But Chris, for me as a kid, watching the tarantula when you had the tiki idol and it was bringing you all bad news,” Daly began. “That scene. It’s on the ground, it’s up the bed, it’s actually crawling on you. Did that scare you shooting it?”

Knight admitted that he was “terrified,” but insisted he felt “the perfect kind of terrified.”

“I got to prove my hero self to the ladies,” he teased. “I shouldn’t let them know that I’m scared to death.”

Williams, who played Knight’s on-screen older brother Greg Brady, recalled that “it was a real spider” and that Knight “had nothing under it, it was on him.”

“And then I came in and I had to figure out how to get it off of him,” he added.

Williams admitted he had some sympathy for the spider, sharing that he was the owner of a pet tarantula himself at the time and thus “didn’t want it to be hurt, so I was able to scoop it up and let it land” in the scene.

Knight then revealed “they did lie to [him] about the tarantula ahead of shooting the scene,” which was as part of the show’s Season 4 installment titled “Pass the Tabu.”

“They told me that they put ball bearings on its fangs so that it couldn’t inject [anything],” he said.

Co-anchor Hoda Kotb praised Plumb’s work as middle daughter Jan Brady, noting that she grew up as a middle child herself.

“You really made it feel better to be a middle kid,” Kotb gushed.