Thank you for being a fair-weather friend?

In a recently unearthed interview from the Archive of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Rue McClanahan revealed behind-the-scenes details of her Golden Girls costars.

For seven seasons, viewers fell in love with Blanche, Rose, Dorothy, and Sophia — four young-at-heart housemates living together in Miami — but did the actresses have the same chemistry off camera?

According to McClanahan, who played sexy and sassy Blanche Devereaux, she didn’t have the warmest friendship with Bea Arthur, who played Dorothy Zbornak.

“Bea and I didn’t have a lot of relationship going on. Bea is a very, very eccentric woman. She wouldn’t go to lunch [with me] unless Betty [White] would go with her,” McClanahan said in the interview. “She was very dependent on keeping everything as it always had been, and I was anything but that.”

Ironically, McClanahan was the one who convinced Arthur to take the role, which she had been reluctant to play.

“I called her and said, ‘Why are you going to turn down the best script that’s ever going to come across your desk as long as you live?'”

McClanahan had a much closer relationship with White, who played sweetly naive Rose Nylund.

“Betty and I loved word games, and we would play word games every day,” she said. “We had games going all the time off camera.”

Fun fact: McClanahan was originally slated to play the role of Rose, and White was set to play the roll of Blanche. During the audition process, producers asked the women to read each other’s parts and decided to swap roles, much to McClanahan’s delight.

“It would have been painful for me to have to go to work every day and play Rose,” she admitted. “They loved what [Betty] did. She did a beautiful, funny job [with Rose].”

Although the women will forever be linked to their famous characters, McClanahan admits that they couldn’t be more different from their Golden Girl personas.

“None of us was like any of our characters,” she said. “People ask me if I am like Blanche and my standard answer is: ‘Get serious! Look at the facts, Blanche is a man-crazy, glamorous, extremely sexy, successful with men Southern belle from Atlanta, Georgia, and I’m not from Atlanta!’

“We weren’t like our characters at all. Betty probably the least of all. I would say Estelle [Getty] was more like Sophia, although she wasn’t at all pushy or vitriolic. Estelle was funny. She was Jewish, New York funny. She kept saying, ‘Can’t we make these characters Jewish?’ She would have felt so much more comfortable than trying to be Italian, although it worked.

“Bea was the straightest character, the least eccentric, but certainly Dorothy’s failure in life was very different from Bea’s huge success in life. Bea has got a very funny take on people and she’s quick-witted. And Betty has nothing but brains. She’s almost as smart as I am!”

The actress also revealed that Getty suffered from an extreme case of stage freight.

“She had an awful time remembering her lines because she would freeze and panic,” she said. “She would start getting under a dark cloud the day before tape day; you could see a big difference in her on that day. She was unreachable. She was just as uptight as a human being can get. When your brain is frozen like that, you can’t remember lines. I would always say to her, ‘Now listen, Estelle, here’s the way to do it. Don’t try to think of what word comes after what word, think of the picture and tell the story,’ but she was so scared that she couldn’t. She couldn’t think of her name, poor little thing.”

Despite any drama off camera, the women were convincing as four friends who would do anything for one another.

“We got lots of letters from teenage girls who were unhappy at home and wanted to move in with us. They thought it was real life,” she said. “The appeal of these four characters was their warmth and friendship and the fact that we stuck together through thick and thin.”

Rue McClanahan passed away in 2010 at age 76 from a stroke. Bea Arthur died from cancer in 2009 at age 86, and Estelle Getty, who suffered from Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disease, died in 2008 at age 84. Surviving Golden Girls star Betty White, 91, is as busy as ever. She currently stars on the hit comedy series, Hot in Cleveland.