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The Best Guest Stars On That ’70s Show

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Point Place’s revolving door of celebrity cameos turned “That ’70s Show” into one of the sneakiest star-studded sitcoms of its era.

Over its eight seasons on Fox, “That ’70s Show” built its core cast — Topher Grace’s Eric Forman, Laura Prepon’s Donna Pinciotti, Mila Kunis’s Jackie Burkhart, and Ashton Kutcher’s Michael Kelso among them — into a genuine ensemble. But the show also had a habit of stunt-casting Hollywood royalty and future A-listers in one-off or recurring roles, sometimes for a laugh, sometimes to make television history. A new retrospective, “The Best Guest Stars On That ’70s Show,” rounds up the sharpest of those appearances.

• Betty White played Kitty Forman’s bitterly rude mother, Bea Sigurdson, opposite Tom Poston as her husband, Burt.
• Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s 1998 kiss with Eric Forman in “Eric’s Buddy” was one of the first male-male kisses shown on North American primetime TV.
• Bruce Willis played Playboy Club security chief Vic and offered Kelso a job — while Kelso’s real-life girlfriend, Demi Moore, happened to be Willis’s ex-wife.

Betty White’s Meanest Role

Long before she became America’s favorite sweet grandmother figure, Betty White used her “That ’70s Show” cameo to torch that image entirely. As Bea Sigurdson, Kitty Forman’s mother, White played the role bitter, sharp-tongued, and openly mean to her daughter — a deliberate inversion of the wholesome persona audiences knew from “The Golden Girls.” She appeared alongside veteran character actor Tom Poston, cast as her long-suffering husband, Burt, rounding out one of the show’s most tonally daring family cameos.

Mary Tyler Moore Comes Full Circle

Mary Tyler Moore’s arc across three episodes as Christine St. George, the glamorous local TV host who becomes Jackie Burkhart’s idol, carried extra weight behind the scenes. Moore filmed her scenes on the same CBS Studio Center soundstage where she’d shot “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” back in the 1970s — the very decade “That ’70s Show” was busy re-creating on the same lot.

The Kiss That Made History

Before he was a leading man, Joseph Gordon-Levitt showed up in the 1998 episode “Eric’s Buddy” as Buddy Morgan, a fellow high schooler whose kiss with Eric Forman became a landmark moment for network television. It stands as one of the first male-male kisses broadcast on North American primetime TV, a genuinely groundbreaking beat tucked inside a show built on stoner jokes and basement hangouts.

Meta Casting and Star-Powered Cameos

Billy Dee Williams turned up as Pastor Dan, giving Eric and Donna their pre-marital counseling — and bonding with Eric over “Star Wars” lore, a wink at Williams’s own turn as Lando Calrissian that the show never bothered to hide. Bruce Willis played Vic, head of security at Chicago’s Playboy Club, dangling a job offer to Kelso in a plot twist made stranger by the fact that Kutcher was dating Willis’s ex-wife, Demi Moore, at the time.

Bruce Willis’s ex-wife was dating the actor playing the guy his character was hiring — and the show cast him anyway.

Jessica Simpson signed on for a multi-episode arc as Kelso’s California girlfriend, Annette, while a pre-fame Amy Adams played popular high schooler Kat Peterson years before her Oscar-nominated run. The series also leaned on 1970s fixtures playing themselves, including shock rocker Alice Cooper, Charo, and Shirley Jones, grounding the sitcom’s fictional Point Place in real decade-appropriate star power. For more on how the show’s regulars fared once the cameras stopped rolling, that ’70s show’s cast has really transformed since the finale, and some of their stories took darker turns than fans expected, as detailed in the tragic details about the cast of that ’70s show.

Between Betty White playing against type, a teenage Joseph Gordon-Levitt making broadcast history, and Bruce Willis hiring his ex-wife’s boyfriend on-screen, “That ’70s Show” packed more genuine star wattage into its guest slots than most sitcoms manage in a full run — and it did it eight seasons running, from 1998 to 2006, without ever losing the basement-circle charm that made Point Place worth visiting in the first place.