It’s the final season of Desperate Housewives but how is it all going to end? Donal O’Donoghue meets Felicity Huffman to talk about leaving Wisteria Lane, her battle with bulimia and why Bree Van de Kamp was the role she really wanted.
It was the husband who first let the cat out of the bag. This was in June when rumours of Desperate Housewives demise were just that. I was scheduled to meet Felicity Huffman, star of the glitzy, sometimes ditzy, drama at the Monte Carlo TV Festival.
Her hubby, William H Macy, was also there to shoot the breeze on his latest vehicle, Shameless. Naturally some pesky journalist asked him the Housewives question: and Macy, a straight-shooting guy, fired back the zinger that the show’s hours might be numbered. The next day Huffman was still reeling. “I asked Bill last night what he was talking about”, she said. “The thing is we’re signed up for two more seasons and our ratings were good last time but TV is a crap shoot. You just don’t know what’s going to happen.” The following month the crap shoot rolled snake eyes. Desperate Housewives would indeed end in 2012, its eighth season. Macy guessed right: or probably had some insider information from his wife who feared the dice falling wrong. But I suspect they won’t mind that much.
While Desperate Housewives made Huffman a household name, her thespian pedigree is peerless. In 2006 she bagged a Best Actress Oscar nomination for playing a pre-op transsexual in Transamerica and her stage CV includes many critical and popular hits, on and off Broadway.
Indeed, Huffman and Macy, who are not known for their love of the celebrity limelight, have long been revered as Hollywood indie royalty. Neither is going to disappear any time soon, regardless of how their small screen adventures pan out. In 2004, Housewives put Huffman on the Hollywood map. She played supermom Lynette Scavo in a show brilliantly different from all that had gone before.
Even so, Huffman now says she would have loved to have essayed Bree Van de Kamp: the rather odd and unquestionably uptight housewife. “I wanted to play Marcia (Cross)’s part because I thought it was such a great character”, she says. “For that first audition I left my two kids at home with a minder and determined to pull myself together. I wore nice pants and did my hair and put on my make-up.
Later, one of the producers came to me and said ‘We knew right away that you were going to be Lynette’ and I asked ‘How?’ And he said ‘Oh my god, you were such a mess! You looked awful, you had food stains on your clothes and your hair was terrible!’ Obviously I didn’t pull myself together that well.”
Felicity Huffman (48) grew up in Bedford, New York, the youngest of eight children. “There was seven girls and one boy and I’m the youngest, so I realise that’s a little golden cradle right there”, she says. “I call my sisters daily. They are my solace and my north star so I’m a lucky girl.” In those early days her mother, Grace, said of Huffman that she knew her youngest was going to be an actor because she was ‘a loud and obnoxious child’.
Huffman laughs at the recycled quote. “I wanted to be a ballerina, like a lot of children, but my mom said no, you’re loud and obnoxious, so I reckon you’d like acting. So when I was ten years old she sent me back East for two months to acting camp and the minute that happened, meeting those kids who were acting cool and smoking and doing the jitterbug, I was hooked.”
But adolescence brought its own demons. When she was 16, Huffman was struggling with weight issues and an eating disorder. She weighed 160 pounds and sported a scary perm. “I felt the pressure and it took a number of years to navigate that”, she says of her five-year battle with anorexia and bulimia. “When you’re an adolescent girl, or maybe it was just me, when you’re 15 or 16 your body suddenly balloons! In trying to deal with that I went to extreme measures and became very thin for a while and then pretty fat. It ping-ponged back and forth and there was a lot of therapy and a lot of support from my mother and sisters to help me get through it. It was a constant battle.”
As her mother had predicted, young Felicity went into acting: from high school to a drama degree at New York University and then an up-and-coming off-Broadway Theatre. That was how she first met Macy, actor and co-founder of the Atlantic Theater Company (with playwright, David Mamet). Huffman was called for an audition. “That first time I met Bill was just after I came back from Nice with some mean boyfriend”, she says. “Bill was interviewing me to become a student. I thought that he would ask me about acting so I was ready with all those answers. But instead he asked me what was France like and whether I thought he should go. So the attraction was immediate for me but I still had the bad perm and I was probably still 15 or 20 pounds overweight.”
Despite her misgivings about her appearance – Huffman can be very self-deprecating – the couple married in 1997 and have two children, Sofia (11) and Georgia (9). “It’s a wonderful time in my life right now and I’m conscious of it,” she says. “I’m very conscious that my husband and I are both working in jobs that we love, our children are healthy and we love being with them. When Bill walks into the room it still gives me a thrill. My heart still goes: ‘It’s Bill Macy!’”
She says that her children are not allowed to watch Desperate Housewives, even though they are regular visitors to the set. “There have been a bunch of times when we were shooting and they were hidden under tables or behind couches,” she says. “But I don’t quite know how to navigate the whole ‘I’m-on-TV famous thing’. It can be so warping to the person it’s happening to, so I can only imagine what it is like for the child. I don’t know what to do so I keep (my children) at a distance.”
She says her husband is a wonderful father to their children. “He’s playful and kind and strong and the girls just adore him. I don’t think it gets a whole lot better than Bill Macy as a dad.” Before Desperate Housewives disappears forever, Huffman is hoping that the show will tackle one final subject in its valedictory season. “The menopause”, she says and laughs. “Well, my husband jokes that Desperate Housewives is the only show that shows women in their 40s. This is a show that took on women and changed the face of Hollywood, certainly the pilots and the TV shows that were coming along. Suddenly women in their 40s were viable and sexy and interesting. I’m grateful for that because we’ve bumped that ceiling, that cliff, up to 50. You used to fall off when you were 40 and now maybe it’s 50 so I’m hanging on by the fingernails.”
Recalling her eight seasons on Wisteria Lane, Huffman picks a few of her favourite things. “There was a storyline where Lynette thinks Tom is having an affair and she moves out for a while. I liked that through-line. Marc Cherry (creator of Housewives) wanted to fool around with the idea of breaking us up in year two or three and there was such an outcry, from not only people but also ABC.
They said: ‘that’s the one normal couple so don’t bust them up’. I love Doug Savant (who plays Tom) so much. We have the best time together. Of course now we’re so old that in between takes we fall asleep on the couch. I’m not kidding. They keep taking pictures of us every day asleep on the couch.”
Right now Huffman is arguably more famous than her much lauded husband. ‘Yay!’ she says before offering that her husband has been famous longer and can boast a much more impressive back-catalogue. In any case they were never in competition. And because fame came relatively late to Huffman – she was 40 when Desperate Housewives lit her up – she was never in any danger of losing touch with reality.
The actress says that she and husband are still freelancers and abide by the freelancers’ anxious philosophy that your current job may very well be your last. “When Desperate Housewives came along I did appreciate that it was wonderful and interesting but I also knew that it had a shelf life”, she says. So what happens to Huffman after Housewives? Already she is looking at developing a number of TV projects and has directed her first short feature.
Even so, looking to the future, she shakes her head like the veteran freelance actor that she is. “You know I have heard so many different pieces of advice on that”, she says. “I’ve heard that you disappear for five years and go into acting jail. Marc Cherry says that you should disappear for five years so that when you re-emerge people will say, ‘Oh, it’s a rediscovery!’
But those are all prescriptions that actors have very little control over – you say yes or no to the parts you are offered – unless you’re one of those actors who create their parts. But I don’t think I’m one of them.”
Donal O'Donoghue
