A prominent cast member on Desperate Housewives has admitted that he was “oblivious” to the apparent feuds simmering behind the scenes on the hit show.
Jesse Metcalfe, who played teenage gardener John Rowland, spoke about his time on the show during a panel at the Southfork Experience last week.
During its eight-season run, there were persistent rumors of feuds among members of the leading female cast — Teri Hatcher, Eva Longoria, Felicity Huffman, Marcia Cross, and Nicolette Sheridan.
But Metcalfe, whose character had an affair with Longoria’s Gabrielle Solis, didn’t pick up on any apparent bad feeling.
“I was just happy to have a job. I went through an entire pilot season, I didn’t book anything, and I tested for Desperate Housewives, which was a recast, right at the end of that pilot season, and ended up booking it,” he said.
Metcalfe said that he was “very grateful” for being a series regular in the show’s first season, and reprising the role in later seasons.
“I was just kind of riding the wave, you know, because that show really broke me and I had everything coming at me and I was just enjoying it,” the John Tucker Must Die actor said.
“Matter of fact, there’s a lot of stories about all the drama on that set between some of our lead females. And I was like, I was oblivious to it, basically, you know, because I was just so thrilled to be on a show and just so in the moment.”
Hatcher, who was the show’s biggest star when it began, previously fielded claims of difficult behavior on the set of the ABC show, in which she played illustrator and (occasional) single mother Susan Mayer.
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In a 2013 interview with The Daily Mail, Hatcher denied claims she had a difficult relationship with the show’s crew after her cast mates, Cross, Longoria, and Huffman reportedly sent them a farewell gift of luggage without involving Hatcher. “That crew knows I’d have jumped in front of a bus for them at any moment,” she told the publication.
Another notable occurrence happened with Sheridan as she filed a lawsuit against Disney, ABC, production studio Touchstone, and show creator Marc Cherry after her character, Edie Britt, was killed off the show in 2009. At the time, she alleged that Cherry struck her on the head following a disagreement on set, and wrote her off the show after she complained. She claimed she was wrongfully terminated.
“I was the victim of assault and battery on the set of Desperate Housewives by the creator of the show, my boss,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2018. “I reported him and was retaliated against for doing so, and fired off the show. That is against the law.”
After a judge had thrown out her case in 2017, she filed to appeal, but the case was then thrown out again under the claim that Sheridan was not “wrongfully terminated,” but the production company simply chose not to renew her contract, which cannot be considered discrimination.
Kerry Washington’s production company is producing a Desperate Housewives reboot called Wisteria Lane, a nod to the street name where the main cast lived.
Per the official synopsis, the series is a “fun, sexy, darkly comedic soap/mystery, in the vein of Desperate Housewives” and will center around “a group of 5 very different friends and sometimes frenemies who all live on a picture-perfect cul-de-sac called ‘Wisteria Lane.’”
“On the surface, all the Wisteria neighbors are living the dream. Beautiful homes, gorgeous families, shiny SUVs in the driveway — but behind those white picket fences and smiling Insta posts, are SECRETS.”
As the spin-off is still in development, Metcalfe said he wasn’t sure if he would be making an appearance in Wisteria Lane, telling the panel he doesn’t “know if they’re going to use any of the original cast.”
