Bianca Wooden
Debra Messing revealed that her iconic character on Will & Grace was originally supposed to be bustier.
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Speaking at The Magic of Will & Grace panel at The Paley Center for Media, the star recalled that the NBC president at the time wasn’t a fan of her chest size. In fact, he wanted her to wear bra inserts to while playing Grace Adler.
“The very first fitting, they had the chicken cutlets to make me bigger,” said Messing (via People). “I just wasn’t a fan of like the whole idea of it.”
Debra Messing Refused to Wear Bra Inserts on Will & Grace
The 54-year-old then recounted how she stood up to the network.
“I was like, ‘You know what? I don’t need that,” she said. “And they’re like, ‘Well, it’s the president of the network.’ And I said, ‘If he wants it, then he needs to come here and tell me to my face.'”
After eight successful seasons and a reboot in 2017, it’s hard to imagine what the show — and the redhead we all know and love — would have looked like had NBC had its way.
Previously, Debra Messing has opened up about feeling insecure about her body in other ways while filming Will & Grace. In 2020, she appeared on an episode of the I Weigh podcast hosted by Jameela Jamil, where she revealed that costume fittings for the program caused her a lot of distress.
“When I started Will & Grace I was a size eight, and what happened was, every time I would go in for a fitting, I couldn’t fit into clothes,” she explained (via ET). “Eighty percent of it I couldn’t fit into, and I would just leave hating my body and hating myself.”
She continued, “So of course, I thought, ‘My life would be so much easier, and it would be easier on everybody trying to do their job, if I just lost weight. So I started doing yoga every single day and I did one of those meal delivery services. I started to get smaller and then I was a six, and they were like, ‘You’re losing weight, you look amazing!'”
However, when the Wedding Date actress finally slimmed down to a size two, she found it to be unsustainable.
“For awhile there, I was maintaining that, and then I got sick,” she recalled. “My body just could not hold out. My adrenals crashed, I was exhausted and it just became clear to me that I couldn’t be healthy and a size two at the same time.”
