Steve From ‘Blue’s Clues’ Reveals How Death Rumors Hit Him In The Most Painful Way

Original “Blue’s Clues” host Steve Burns says long-running internet rumors about him dying severely deepened his struggle with depression.

The former Nickelodeon personality opened up about his mental health while appearing on Rainn Wilson’s “Soul Boom” podcast on Thursday, where he told “The Office” alum that the “urban legend” eventually tricked him into thinking he might be better off dead.

“I was in kind of the throes of this depression after I left the show,” he explained. “But what a lot of people don’t understand is that, that during the show, the internet was beginning to internet, and the world decided, or a large portion of the world decided, that I had died.”

While the bogus stories behind his alleged death ran the gamut, baseless claims that he had died of an overdose or by suicide made the already-struggling Burns feel even more hopeless.

The suicide rumors were “not what you want to hear when you’re severely clinically depressed,” he said. “But when a gazillion people you’ve never met tell you that you’re dead, it’s bad when you’re severely clinically depressed. And there was nothing I could do about this rumor. I mean, Nickelodeon didn’t like it, either.”

Though the network tried to help him debunk the rumors with big media appearances, Burns discovered the fiction was much harder to undo than he believed.

And the longer the lie lingered, the more it hurt the star, who told Wilson, “When a rumor like that persists for three or four years, it stops being funny. When it persists for 10 years, it feels like a cultural preference … When it persists for 15 or 20 years, you start to feel like you’re supposed to be [dead].”

So after repeatedly hearing he was dead for years after leaving “Blue’s Clues” in 2001, the star said he fell into a “gray” period of life, where he did little more than drink and isolate himself.

“Everyone thought I was dead, and eventually, I started playing along,” he explained.

Burns was only able to dig himself out of his depression once he hit a low point in life while caring for his dying father and realizing, “I don’t like how I feel, all the time, and I can’t do this.”

Curiously, the character that brought him so much angst ended up guiding him out of the darkness.

“Steve became my teacher,” he said. “Every day, on ‘Blue’s Clues,’ I would sit on a chair and look at someone in the eye and ask, ‘Will you help me?’ It wasn’t until I did that in my life, in my real life, that things changed.”

Elsewhere during the interview, Burns explained the impossible bind children’s television hosts face: They can be seen as an “implausible saint” or a secret trainwreck, with nothing in between, he said.

“You get bifurcated and marginalized to the extremes,” he said, as he admitted he worried he would eventually “disappoint everyone” when they discovered he was a “normal” person with both gifts and flaws.

“It was difficult to be the happiest man in North America when I did not feel that way,” the actor said.

Burns previously shed light on his exit from “Blue’s Clues” in a 2022 interview with Variety when he said, “It was my job to be utterly and completely full of joy and wonder at all times, and that became impossible.”

“I was always able to dig and find something that felt authentic to me that was good enough to be on the show, but after years and years of going to the well without replenishing it, there was a cost.”

If you or someone you know needs help, call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org for mental health support. Additionally, you can find local mental health and crisis resources at dontcallthepolice.com. Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention.