In 1979, Greg Evigan was a star in the popular NBC action-comedy series B.J. and the Bear. His co-star? A chimpanzee.
Evigan played trucker B.J. McKay for three seasons on the series, while his sidekick, a trained chimp named Bear, went along for the ride. But in one episode, Bear caused chaos on the set and cost producers a lot of money.
During an appearance on The Jim Masters Show in August 2026, Evigan, 72, recounted a wild situation while filming the November 1979 episode “Mary Ellen.” In the episode, B.J. and Bear transport a circus veteran and his trained elephant.
Evigan told Masters that the chimp, whose real name was Sam, was not happy to see an elephant and a tiger on set.
“We were working in this all around all these animals,” Evigan shared. “And so Sam’s supposed to ride out on this elephant. And then a tiger is supposed to pass in front of him. So our trainer had a tiger. He had a tiger, a lion, a couple chimps, another big chimp, full grown.”
Evigan noted that the trainer expressed concern because the lion and elephant were two “natural enemies” of the chimp and suggested it wasn’t a good idea to film with those animals, but the show’s director insisted.
“So now we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to do it,” Evigan continued. “So the only thing they come up with is, all right, we’ll blindfold the chimp, right? And then we’ll have them walk the elephant out. We’ll have a long line tied to the blindfold on the release of the blindfold. So we’ll roll the camera and then we’ll pull the thing off the chimp. He’ll be there. We’ll get the shot and the tiger will walk right in front of him and we’ll cut. …. So we rig up this whole elaborate shot. The chimp does not like being blindfolded. He’s like, he’s like crazy.”
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Evigan said they strapped Sam down for the scene, but after pulling the blindfold off the chimp, he did indeed see the elephant—and he freaked out.
“He’s like, ‘Oh my God, I gotta get out of here,’” Evigan shared. “Then all of a sudden, this tiger walks into the scene in front of him. Well, he goes ballistic. He breaks out of the ties. He jumps off the elephant. He heads for the, you know, for the hills. I mean, nobody could stop him. …And there was these eucalyptus trees, like a whole line maybe for a mile of eucalyptus trees, and he climbs… these were probably some of the biggest ones I’ve ever seen. Well, here’s the chimp at the top of the eucalyptus and he doesn’t even climb trees. He’s a domestic, he’s an actor!”
Evigan recalled that everyone on set was rattled because time was money and producers were wasting time dealing with the chaos.
“So now we got they got bananas, fruit, they got everything you could think of that a chimp likes, you know, and he would knock them down for hours, hours,” the actor said. “He’s sitting up in the tree, you know, he’s just back and forth up in this windy tree.”
The trainer finally shot off a fake pop gun, which scared the chimp into climbing back down for good.
“We all felt bad. We felt bad for him, you know,” Evigan said. “And he was sobbing like a kid. He came running over to me. He gave me this hug. He’s holding me, and I’m like, ‘It’s okay, buddy. It’s okay.'”
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In 2020, Evigan told Page Six a show like B.J. and the Bear wouldn’t fly today due to animal rights issues.
“Looking back on it, I wish I’d known more then and I probably would have tried a lot harder to make sure [Sam] had a better life after the show,” the actor admitted. “The trainer that was working on the show had the chimp, but then they grow up and they’re the size of us and they’re pretty hard to handle.
“That’s why there aren’t too many shows like that because there shouldn’t be shows like that where you have animals in captivity that should be in the wild,” he added.
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