USA TODAY International Edition
Cast picks up where old ‘Will & Grace’ left off
BURBANK, CALIF. It’s not even lunch, and this show’s almost in the can.
The cast of Will & Grace assembled this morning in late August for a read-through of a fresh script, and an hour later, swiftly moved on to blocking it.
In one scene, Will (Eric McCormack) and Grace (Debra Messing) are celebrating in her newly expanded office, and Jack (Sean Hayes) strolls in.
“What are we celebrating?” he asks, shimmying next to them.
The trio practice the scene three times, as Hayes switches up his dance moves to match the beats of the script. Director James Burrows, who has helmed nearly every episode of Will & Grace asks for another take.
“Once more, with feeling!” says Megan Mullally, popping out of the doorway and flipping back her script.
Mullally makes her entrance. “Sorry I’m late, but I got here as soon as I wanted to,” she says, making her nonchalant entrance as the eternally cutting Karen.
An hour in, this foursome has begun relying less on the scripts and are memorizing their lines as they go.
During breaks, we caught up with the cast and creators.
ERIC MCCORMACK
How often were they in the same room over the last decade? “As a foursome? Not one time,” says McCormack, sitting on a couch on one of the sets. “It’s just the way things work out. I saw each of them, they’d see each other, but never (all) together.”
DEBRA MESSING
Messing hasn’t yet dealt with the loss of Debbie Reynolds, who played her mom and died in December. “It was devastating news,” she says. “And I know the world mourned her loss.” She says the show will honor Reynolds in an upcoming episode. “Will & Grace fans mourned her in a different way. I think they need to be able to participate in
the mourning process.”
CO-CREATOR MAX MUTCHNICK
Mutchnick says it’s “a safe bet” there will be a trans character at some point. “We’re not finished writing the season,” he says. “I don’t think we’re going to write a story ripped from the headlines, but these people are living in New York City, and as New Yorkers they’re going to respond to what’s happening in the world.”
SEAN HAYES
In his dressing room, Hayes recalls how gay marriage was legalized by the Supreme Court on his birthday in 2015. The goal of a show like Will & Grace, he says, is “if you can just show that gay people are the same as straight people and white people and black people — we’re all the same. It’s laughable that you have to say that out loud, that we’re all part of the human race. You just have to keep saying it, I guess.”
MEGAN MULLALLY
Mullally recalls getting the script for last year’s voting video the cast did on a lark. “When Max sent us the script for that ‘Vote, honey’ video that we did, I read it and I picked up my phone and I emailed Max: ‘Why can’t we do the show again?’ And he emailed right back: ‘We can.’ That was just based on my instinct reading the script. I was like, this is all still there. I was laughing and crying when I was reading it. And I thought, we should just do the show. Like, it would be kind of revolutionary to just do it again.”