Steve Burns hosted the Nickelodeon series Blue’s Clues for four seasons between 1996 and 2002, which is pretty weird, considering he was supposed to have died in 1998. That was the year rumors started making the rounds—for whatever reason—that Burns had passed away from a heroin overdose. In other versions of the story, he’d either committed suicide or been killed in a car accident. But as it turns out, this is just another one of the internet’s favorite urban legends.
While appearing on Rainn Wilson’s Soul Boom podcast last year, Burns revealed that he was in the “throes of depression” when he left Blue’s Clues in 2002, and speculation about his death was not what he wanted to be hearing. “When a rumor like that persists for three or four years, it stops being funny,” Burns explained. “When it persists for 10 years it feels like a cultural preference,” he continued. “When it persists for 15 or 20 years, you start to feel like you’re supposed to be [dead].”
Steve From ‘Blue’s Clues’ Wasn’t Dead, but the Rumors Nearly Broke Him
Following his departure from the show, Burns turned to alcohol and barely left his Brooklyn home. “I didn’t recognize me,” the actor told Wilson. “Everyone thought I was dead, and eventually I started playing along.” But although the experience took a toll on Burns as time went on, he said that he learned one valuable lesson from it: “Never Google myself.”
Nowadays, the rumors have died down significantly (no pun intended), but Burns still finds himself addressing them on occasion. However, he opts to treat them with playful humor at this point in his life. For example, Burns’s current Instagram handle is @steveburnsalive. And just to make it perfectly clear to his hundreds of thousands of followers, Burns posted a picture of himself in 2024 sporting a shirt that says, “Not dead yet”:
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