Gossipers suggest there's off-screen drama between Megan Mullally and Debra Messing.
Matt BaumeIf you were worried about the relationship between the cast of Will & Grace, you can relax. Eric McCormack, who plays Will on the beloved NBC sitcom, says everything’s fine. And would he lie to you?
“It seems crazy,” McCormack told Us Weekly.“It is crazy! I think people worried about that entirely too much.”
Rumors have been swirling since Debra Messing and Megan Mullally, who play Grace and Karen on the show, unfollowed each other on Instagram. “They can’t stand to be near each other, and it created an impossible atmosphere on the set,” an anonymous source told Radar Online, a claim which can’t possibly be verified.
But McCormack says that “the four of us get along like a house on fire, we always have,” an evocative metaphor.
The actors have also posted vague status updates about removing toxic people from their lives, which fans have speculated refers to each other. Messing also failed to tag Mullally in an Instagram post at one point. Observers have used these minutiae to suggest that the real reason the show’s reboot is ending after the upcoming season because of the alleged feud.
But while the third season will indeed be the last, McCormack says the explanation is far less dramatic. “We want to make sure that it ends up properly, that we go out on top, that it never gets sort of lost in the shuffle,” he told the tabloid magazine.
Rumors of behind-the-scenes feuds are nothing new for TV shows, however. In 2015, fans of The Good Wife developed a theory that Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi — who played BFFs and coworkers Alicia and Kalinda — had fallen out on set after they stopped appearing in the same scenes together. But according to Robert King and Michelle King, that’s because their characters’ relationship was deteriorating, not the actresses’.
When Panjabi departed the show in Season Six, their final farewell scene was shot with body doubles, with the cast arguing publicly about whether the actress’ schedule was too tight to shoot it together.
Other shows which have attracted rampant feud speculation include Castle, The X-Files, and The Affair, with the latter killing off offscreen in 2018. The actress told interviewers that she wasn’t allowed to talk about the reason for for her departure but suggested that show creator Sarah Treem was behind it.
But one of the most stunning — and factually verifiable — TV feuds might involve David Yost, who walked off the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers set after ongoing homophobic harassment from the crew. The show responded by recasting his role with an elderly actor for a storyline in which the character mysterious ages, then leaves for another planet where he decides to marry a woman and live out the rest of his days. “He’s so happy he can’t speak,” another character weakly explains in the Blue Ranger’s final episode.
Yost has gone on to pursue his own acting projects, while speaking out for equality and LGBTQ+ representation.
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