‘Saved By The Bell’ Superfan Pete Holmes Kinda Creeped Out Mark-Paul Gosselaar Last Night

I am on the record as saying that if I ever get a chance to interview Tiffani Thiessen I will ask her hundreds of questions about how and why a teenage Kelly Kapowski consistently dated creepy old dudes with nefarious intentions (her mid-20s manager at The Max, Jeff, while she was a senior in high school; a successful, late-20s/early-30s lawyer, Brian Hansen, while on vacation after her junior year of high school; and her late-20s/early-30s anthropology professor, Jeremiah Lasky, while she was a student in college), and whether that behavior may have been a sign of a potentially troubling underlying psychological issue, so I can sympathize with Pete Holmes a little bit here. It’s easy to fall down that rabbit hole. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to tell Mark-Paul Gosselaar — to his face, on television — that I thought of Zack Morris as my dad, but hey, who am I to judge?

Related: Mark-Paul Gosselaar seems incredibly well-adjusted for someone who grew up in front of the camera. He takes the majority of Holmes’s questions right in stride, even though he’s been dealing with people bringing up Saved by the Bell in just about every interview he’s done for the past 20 years. He’d be perfectly justified in throwing a fit about it every five or six months if he wanted to, but instead, he laughs it off, offers some little-known trivia (Jesse’s caffeine pills were actually Red Hots!), and talks about having a crush on Thiessen during the Malibu Sands episodes of the show, like every other teenage male in America at the time. He seems like a pretty solid dude.

Plus: MUSTACHE.

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