In the days before Dustin Diamond’s death in 2021, he allegedly only heard from one of his Saved by the Bell costars – Lark Voorhies.
“[Lark] was the only one that really reached out to him and is really heartfelt. I know they had a connection,” Dan Block, a friend of Diamond’s said in an upcoming episode of Hollywood Demons, per Us Weekly.
“[Lark] was a really good person and she left a voicemail for him and we played it for him before he died,” Block continued. “He enjoyed it.”
Voorhies, 52, made a rare appearance in the episode titled “Scarred by the Bell” and described Diamond as her “very good friend.”
“I miss him,” she added.
reallarkvoorhies/Instagram
Diamond and Voorhies rose to fame along with castmates Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Tiffani Thiessen, Elizabeth Berkley and Mario Lopez on the series in the early ‘90s. While several of Saved by the Bell’s stars went on to pursue successful acting careers, Diamond opted to pivot to stand-up comedy instead.
Diamond’s tell-all book, Behind the Bell, published in 2009, made several negative claims about his costars in the show, and the group seemingly distanced themselves from him. However, he later recanted what was written in the book and publicly apologized for it.
“I wanted to write a book about my life. I was supposed to talk to a ghostwriter for 40 hours total. I talked to a guy for 90 minutes total,” Diamond said during an interview with Lopez for Extra in 2016, per Variety.
He added that “two weeks later” he received a copy of the book in the mail and claimed the ghostwriter had “fabricated a whole bunch of stuff.”
Diamond was diagnosed with stage IV small-cell carcinoma after seeing a doctor for an unrelated issue. Three weeks later, he died at the age of 44 on February 1, 2021.