Jesse Metcalfe Recalls Being ‘Oblivious’ to Rumored Drama Between ‘Desperate Housewives’ Costars

While Jesse Metcalfe had a front row seat to any alleged drama on the Desperate Housewives set, he doesn’t have much insight into the speculation.

Metcalfe, 46, reflected on his time playing John the gardener on the ABC series during a panel at the Southfork Experience: Dallas Panel: The Ewing Heirs earlier this month. “I was just happy to have a job,” he admitted. “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.”

Metcalfe recalled feeling “very grateful” for the experience, adding, “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 actor then directly referenced the alleged drama.

“Matter of fact, there’s a lot of stories about all the drama on that set between some of our lead females,” Metcalfe noted. “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.”

Desperate Housewives, which aired on ABC from 2004 to 2012, followed a group of women living on the fictional street of Wisteria Lane as they weathered a slew of personal issues over the span of eight seasons. Teri Hatcher, Felicity Huffman, Marcia Cross, Eva Longoria and Nicollette Sheridan made up the original main cast. (Sheridan exited earlier, fueling the rumors.)

While the show became a major hit, there was speculation about tension on set. Sheridan’s exit from the show after season 5 came after public issues with creator Marc Cherry. There were also questions about where Hatcher, 60, stood with the rest of her costars.

“I will never disclose the true and complicated journey of us all, but I wish everyone on this show well,” Hatcher wrote via email to TV Guide in 2012. “Marc created out of thin air a majestic street called Wisteria Lane with its picket fences, its flowers always in bloom … and four really complimentary characters: a selfish girl, a harried woman, a repressed control freak and a soul-searching, well-meaning fumbler. Those four characters and the actresses who played them seemed to meld together in a way that harkens the phrase ‘once in a lifetime.’”

Longoria, 50, meanwhile, questioned the narrative, sharing on the “Armchair Expert” podcast in November 2023, “I remember even back then it was a narrative about women. Because there were all these shows with men on the air, and nobody was like, ‘They’re fighting!’”

The actress expressed gratitude to her costars.

“They all had such a better handle on fame, on that narrative. I’m like, ‘[People] are saying we’re fighting.’ They’re like, ‘Well, that’s just a narrative they do on women because we’re over 40 on a television show.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ I wasn’t even that smart to understand that,” Longoria continued. “Anything that happened outside the show, we were like, ‘What?’ We could never come up for air to really get outside of ourselves. We were only on the set. … I remember that noise being outside of us. We were in such a bubble with our crew and each other.”