As Lynette in Desperate Housewives, Felicity Huffman has struggled with marital woes. But in real life she couldn’t be luckier in love. As the show’s final season hits our screens, she describes why her actor-and-DIY-fiend husband William H Macy is the perfect partner, and why she adores her Desperate Housewife co-stars even if they do make her feel like an ‘elephant’
'What I'm looking forward to most after Desperate Housewives is eating bread and cheese and ice cream,' says Felicity
Felicity Huffman snorts with laughter at my suggestion that she is as much a beauty as any of the other Desperate Housewives stars. Dressed to kill for the YOU photo shoot, and made up to match, the 49-year-old actress looks far more stunning than her alter ego Lynette Scavo has ever been allowed to in the show that begins its eighth – and final – season on E4 tonight.
In London with her husband, actor William H Macy, 61 (currently starring in the US version of Shameless), and their two daughters, Sofia, 11, and Georgia, nine, she talks about the demise of her on-screen relationship, her real-life marriage, and her Desperate Housewives ‘community’ – friends Eva Longoria, Teri Hatcher and Marcia Cross.
I have always liked the fact that Lynette was the mum and the other girls carry the glamour quotient for the show. When we started I was still nursing my younger daughter, so when it came to dressing Lynette it was just her husband’s jeans, button-up tops and Birkenstocks. She made her entrance as a not-glamorous, tired and overwhelmed mother, but eight years on they have promised me that she will get her groove back and maybe she’ll make her exit in a dress and heels.
I have to say that the writers are excited and rejuvenated this year and I think the storylines reflect it – I have some wonderfully challenging scenes. I don’t have any input except to say to wardrobe, ‘Isn’t it time for me to throw away the big slacks and sandals?’ As Tom and Lynette are now separated the big question in series eight is, ‘Will they or won’t they get back together?’ There is a lot of fertile ground for Lynette, who is having a hard time coming to terms with her separation. She’s struggling with the children, she’s worried about who Tom might or might not be dating, and then, of course, all the women have to deal with the consequences of the murder that ended series seven. It’s brilliant.
Beauty could never have been my currency. I look OK. I look better in person than I do on film, which is bad because it’s how I make my living, but I am not a beauty and on balance I am glad. Beauty can make you powerful in a way that isn’t good for you. Being OK is better for the person I have become.
From left: Felicity and co-star Daran Norris in the final series of Desperate Housewives; with her husband William H Macy. They have been married for 14 years
I am all for plastic surgery, I can’t wait to get my face lifted but my husband says, ‘No, don’t do it.’
I think if it makes you feel better, go for it, but it would be nice if it looked good. There are a lot of people out there who are disasters and you think, ‘Why did you do that?’ and I do think it’s a slippery slope. Like cola and crisps, it’s addictive – you can’t have just one face-lift.
I am so out of the limelight that I haven’t had to deal with too much scrutiny or paparazzi interest. Marcia is a world-class beauty, the whole world is in love with Eva and Teri looks amazing – and I have always been very happy for them to be the cover girls. I could never compete with them but I am looking forward to Lynette dressing up a little bit and maybe going a little wild now that she and her husband Tom have finally – after five children together, her cancer and endless other intrigues over eight seasons – parted.
I am the biggest one on the show. When I go into the wardrobe trailer the rest of the cast are all there with their 25-inch waists and their tiny little jeans, and I come in and I feel like an elephant.
I am a normal weight – and I feel huge, like, ‘Let’s play field hockey.’ It sounds like I am being
self-deprecating but I am just giving you the truth.
The pressure on women to be thin is like a plague. I have gone through my life, like a lot of women, rating my experiences on the basis of, ‘Was I thin at that time or fat?’ And it doesn’t seem to let up. In her 70s and 80s my mother was still saying, ‘I’ve got to lose weight.’ I would do anything to save my daughters from that pain. I know they will probably have to go through heartbreak but I would just love it if they didn’t hate their bodies.
My daughters are 11 and nine now and they are still little girls. I would love to have a third but my husband says, ‘No, we are just getting to the place where you can say, “Put on your shoes and get in the car,” and they actually put on their shoes and get in the car.’
I have such a hard time saying no to my children. I do the worst thing – I don’t say no and then they go on and on about whatever it is they want and finally I break. My friends say to me, ‘You have got to set the boundaries early with your children.’ And I say, ‘You’re right.’ But I still can’t say no.
Home is the best place on earth. Our house in California is set in almost three acres and we aspire to self-sufficiency – and I love to get the girls involved. I like it when Georgia brings in strawberries from her patch or when Sofia collects the eggs from our chickens or goes and fetches me some mint. We have dogs, too – a rescue dog that you might call a collabrador because he has a bit of labrador in him but he’s a complete mongrel.
Bill loves to build and fix things – if the fridge is broken, he’s there. Our friends next door don’t call the emergency services, they call Bill. When their two-year-old was locked in the bathroom at ten o’clock at night, Bill went round with his tool box and rescued him. He has a very male energy. The other day he came home from the set of Shameless and told me that the actress who plays his estranged wife, Chloe Webb, with whom he has been doing these wild sex scenes, had told him that she loved acting with him because he was ‘such a man and usually I am acting with boys’. He loved that.
My husband says that when he sees me in a sex scene he closes his eyes and hums, but when I see him – and boy has he had some scenes in Shameless – I do that thing that women do, I will quiz him afterwards: ‘What was she like?’, ‘Do you think she’s pretty?’ and ‘How big was her butt?’ But it’s all fine – we both know that having sex on set is the least sexy thing you could ever do in your life because there are 20 people in the room and 100 more watching and all I am ever thinking is, ‘I hope I don’t look disgusting.’
I was against our daughters becoming actors and then Bill turned to me and said, ‘It’s been a great life for us, why deny them?’ So I have compromised and said OK, but they have to go to college first. They are interested in acting – along with lion-taming…
‘I don’t get to see much of the Desperate girls away from work because we are all so busy. But I adore Eva, she is a friend for life’
Being the baby of a big family – I have six sisters and one brother – is like being in a little golden cradle. To my mother, I was always her last treasured baby and then I had all these great elder sisters who were like mini mothers. But the downside of that is that I can’t make decisions, I do everything by committee. Bill jokes that whenever my sisters and I decide to get together for a meal or a movie, it takes ‘13 phone calls and two people will cry’.
Female friendship is very important and sometimes you forget that when you are busy with work, family and marriage. When my children were small my woman friends fell by the wayside, but now when I spend time with them I come out rejuvenated and laughing and happy. I don’t get to see much of the Desperate girls away from work because we are all so busy, but I adore Eva, she is a friend for life, but she is such a star and so busy now that I might have to continue my friendship with her from a distance.
The future is open, which is exciting. I have signed up for a movie that I hope comes off and
I am starting an online magazine called What the Flicker? which is taking up a lot of my time, and hopefully I will be producing a little bit. What I am looking forward to most – apart from seeing more of my girls – is eating bread and cheese and ice cream. I can never eat those things when we are shooting. I have to watch everything, which is such a bore.
Desperate Housewives is a community, a family. The other day we were doing a big scene in a church and one of the crew decided that he was going to make a surprise proposal to his girlfriend – another crew member – on the set. Everyone was in on it except his girlfriend, and the cameras were rolling when he suddenly got down on one knee and proposed, and she burst into tears and we all cried and it was wonderful. Over the eight years, we have had babies, weddings, deaths and now a proposal. It has been the most amazing job ever, and I do wish it could go on, but all good things come to an end.
I can’t think about the end of Desperate Housewives; it’s going to be emotional. I can’t face the idea of going in for the last day of shooting. I would like to send a letter saying, ‘Goodbye! Thank you so much!’
Series eight of Desperate Housewives starts on E4 tonight at 10pm
Huffman hotties
iPhone app? I am a BlackBerry girl.
iPad app? Garageband. The girls and I record music and sing away.
What’s on your iPod? The country music that my daughters love — Lady Antebellum and Taylor Swift — because of the romance and the stories of the songs. I have to say, if you listen to country long enough, you start to want a boyfriend really badly, even if you are happily married!
Book? I’ve just finished William Manchester’s A World Lit Only By Fire, which makes me sound smart, but I remember nothing about it — although I really enjoyed reading it.
Shop? In London it has to be Topshop.
Fashion weakness? Louboutins — I find it hard to spend more than $50 [£32] on a jacket but I’ll spend $800 [£520] on those shoes.
Jewellery? Right now I am wearing a gold chain that Eva Longoria gave me with the initials of my girls on it — Eva is very generous — and a Celtic cross from my late mother, which was blessed by the Pope.
Make-up? I love DuWop and Jane Iredale Mineral Makeup.
Saving up for? A Cartier watch for my sister Jane.
Felicity’s guide to a happy marriage
I feel very blessed. When people ask me what the key to a happy marriage is, I say, ‘Marry Bill Macy.’ But as much as we like to think that falling in love is fate, it’s 90 per cent proximity. So be careful who you get close to.
Bill and I don’t go for date nights, but every couple of months we’ll go away without the children to a hotel for what I think you Brits call a ‘dirty weekend’.
I don’t think there is a right or a wrong way to do anything, let alone marriage. A lot of it is luck, and maturity. If you have a hole in your life and you try to fill it with a husband and by being a perfect wife, I don’t think it’s going to work.
Laughter helps. Bill is really funny and he makes me laugh all the time; I don’t know how I would live without that.
The statistics on marriage aren’t great. I think in the US it’s something like a 50 per cent failure rate for first marriages and about 76 per cent for second marriages. If you applied those statistics to any other institution, someone would step in and say, ‘OK, we have got to revamp this,’ but with marriage everyone closes their eyes, waves and says, ‘Good luck.’ Maybe what went wrong with Lynette is — as Tom has said — that she is always chronically dissatisfied, and perhaps what works for me and Bill is that I know I am so blessed.
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