‘I Dream of Jeannie’ star Barbara Eden on why Jeannie and Tony were never intimate

You can dream but you better not touch!

Barbara Eden, star of I Dream of Jeannie, I Dream of Jeannie… Fifteen Years Later, and (double-checks) I Still Dream of Jeannie sat down with Bill Maher on his Club Random podcast this week to talk about life both in and out of billowy chiffon pink harem pants.

Maher, who time and again impressed upon the star what an impact she made on him as a young lad, spent a good amount of time talking about the specifics of her costume, and what was deemed too risqué for television back in the 1960s. This led Eden, 94, to recall that “the bottle was never allowed in the bedroom.”

The bottle in question, of course, was her character Jeannie’s magenta-colored dwelling space when she wasn’t cavorting about in the Cocoa Beach, Fla., home of her “master,” astronaut Tony Nelson, played by Larry Hagman. (Jeannie was a 2,000-year-old genie, you see.)

Eden, with a chuckle, then repeated, “[It] could never be in my master’s bedroom.”

Maher found this amusing, joking, “Master‘s cool, but not the bottle, that’s right.” Both host and guest settled on “a different time” to explain the use of Jeannie’s term for the man she eventually married, which some might consider a bit of a sexist fantasy.

Maher then added that Tony Nelson was “like Elvis — he could have, and he didn’t.” Eden nodded along with a “yeah, yeah.”

When Maher continued to make jokes (and to say that he himself would have been unable to withstand Barbara Eden’s charms), she then drew a line in the Arabian Night sand, and explained a little bit about the series’ lore.

“She wasn’t real!” she cried out over Maher’s protests that “she was real to me!”

Eden continued, “She was an entity. If you think of the text of the show, well, genies are not human and she thought she was. [But] he knew she wasn’t.”

Maher allowed that maybe he was simply “too young for subtext” when he first encountered the show, which ran for five seasons from 1965 to 1970.

Luckily, Club Random is not restricted, so you can enter anytime and check out the full Barbara Eden interview below.

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