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primal-slayer · 3 months

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Charmed drama Mega-Post

Mid 2000: Per Jason Priestley

Shannen talks Charmed and the joy she gets from working with Holly/Alyssa:

2001:

2.6.01 - Wanda at E!Online reports that there is definitely something a-brewin' regarding the rumors about Alyssa Milano leaving the show. A source close to the set has told her that there is some not-so-charming tension between Alyssa and her onscreen sibs. Apparently it's stemming from jealousy over better storylines and Shannen's more expensive wardrobe, which is full of Chloe and Versace and has created a few budget problems. Link

2.28.01 - E! Online's Wanda reports that things are getting really ugly on the set of "Charmed." Doherty acts like a primadonna all the time, demanding the best clothes and to be in the middle of all the publicity shots, and Milano is sick of it and threatening to leave. Meanwhile, Combs has managed to pretty much stay out of it.

5.10.01 - This week's Soap Opera Weekly interviews Executive Producer Brad Kern in an effort to confirm the rumors behind Alyssa's said departure from the series in her on-the-set battles with co-star Shannen Doherty. "Nothing I've been told from the people that I work for indicates whatsoever that anybody's leaving the show," Kern says of the rumor that Milano wants off and that her character will be killed. "Alyssa and Shannen are professionals. Are they best friends? No. Do they have to be? No. Do they work well together? Yeah. They're sisters in character only. They come in and do their job well. That's all that matters to us."

TVGO: After all the rumors about why you leftCharmed— including backstage feuding with covenmateAlyssa Milano— would you like to take this chance to clarify things for the record? Doherty: You know, I don't really want to be given the opportunity to clear the record. I have absolutely nothing to say. Details magazine will be out in August — that's probably the most honest interview that you'll ever read with me. I picked one magazine to tell the true story in and... if somebody wants to read it, then great. My opinion is, it really doesn't matter. I moved on, they moved on and who cares? You know, everything gets so blown out of proportion by the press that after awhile, you just gotta bury your head in the sand and go, 'I'm done talkin' about it.' TVGO: Any parting advice for your replacement, Rose McGowan? Doherty: [grinning mischievously] No, I think Rose will do a fine job, actually. I think Rose can hold her own and she's very sexy and beautiful — and I think it's actually going to make for a very interesting show, to be honest with you. I wish them all the luck.

"I think my passion for my work was too overwhelming," says Doherty of the fur-fly that became the Charmed set. Doherty claims the issue was one colleague's work ethic. "I mean, what do we do?" she continues. "Say a few lines, sit in our trailers, and get paid a fortune. That's really rough. And yet there was a person there that bitched about her job, day in, day out." According to Doherty, a "mediator" was brought in to diffuse all the poisonous estrogen. To this diplomat she said, "Are you supposed to be my shrink? Because I've already got one." Exchanges like these apparently so riled Milano, Doherty says, that the comely newcomer announced that she would not return to the show if Doherty stayed on. Doherty insists that she was the more politic star; to settle things, she took the matter up with the serge suits at Paramount, threatening to quit unless "changes" were made, though she says she wanted Milano to stay. "I would never wish another actor out of a job," she adds. "I think it's terrible karma." (Milano's reps did not return phone calls.) Six months later, at the end of the season, came a frilly pink slip. Though Doherty claims that she actually wanted to leave the show, she remains bitter that she's yet to hear from Spelling and that no one sat down with her to explain what happened. "You know what?" she says. "The lack of appreciation he's showing for me as a human being and as an actor is overwhelming." (Spelling's office issued a terse "No comment.") Others believe Doherty has her charms. "I worked with her for three years," says Charmed witch No.3, Holly Marie Combs. "I don't think she's difficult at all."

But trouble was undeniably brewing between Doherty and Milano by the time production started on the third season last summer. The fawning quotes to the press had stopped, as had the costars' time together away from the set. As Milano puts it, "I wasn't going to call [Shannen] on the weekend to go hand out." Rumors quickly swirled that Doherty was resentful of Milano's growing popularity, which had translated into several endorsement deals, including one with MCI. But those close to the situation claim it was more complicated than that. "There were no angels," Combs says. "We all had our bad days. We all [got] stressed out."

That's hardly surprising, says executive producer Kern. "People on a TV set work together 12 to 14 hours a day, five days a week. Rarely have I seen cast members stay, or even become, best friends." Adding to the friction, says Combs, was the stars' growing frustration with the show's direction. "We were in [a] rut, where we felt like we were doing the same episodes over and over again," she says. Doherty, in particular, "wanted to make the show bigger and better and stretch her boundaries," says Combs, who has been friends with the actress for eight years, and still speaks frequently with her. "I'd see her in the morning and she'd be like, 'OK, how are we going to fix this scene?' She was really dedicated and she didn't have a lot of patience for anyone [she felt] wasn't."

Whatever broke the spell, "we definitely didn't get along," admits Milano. "Shannen and I are very different people, and I think it's almost like a roommate. If you spend that much time with someone and there are differences anyway, you're not always going to get along.

Both Milano and Combs deny tabloid reports that Doherty would only speak to them when the cameras were rolling. But Milano acknowledges that she and her former costar could get downright witchy: "There were times when I'd come in and say 'Good morning, Shannen,' and she didn't say anything to me. And there wer times when she'd come in and say 'Good morning, Ayssa,' and I wouldn't say anything to her."

"The problems we had weren't things some big company mediator could fix," Combs adds quietly. "They needed to be fixed between us [by] going into [each other's] trailers and saying, 'All right, I don't like it when you do this.' Or 'I didn't like it when you said this.'"

That apparently never happened. Doherty has contended that Milano eventually got fed up and issued producers an ultimatum--either Doherty walked or she would--but Milano insists that isn't truel "I never even thought about doing that," she says. "I couldn't sleep knowing I backed out of something I'd committed to."

Doherty's eventual dismissal, then, came as a surprise. And the form Combs says it took--a phone call to Doherty's lawyer after the embattled actress had flown to Winnipeg, Canada, to start shooting Another Day, USA's upcoming Francis Ford Coppola TV-movie--still clearly angers her. "How do you go from directing the season finale to being [given] a pink slip over the phone, when [you're] in another country, at eight at night?" Combs says. "it was really a tacky way to go about it.

While no one's officially saying why doherty was ultimately cut loose, a series insider says, "It eventually became clear that [either Doherty or Milano] had to go." And Doherty may have been the safer choice, according to Stacey Lynn Koerner, an industry analyst with Initiative Media: "Alyssa is just as popular, if no more so, than Shannen. And when Shannen left 90210, the series did just fine."

While answering questions at the TCA press gathering in Los Angeles, a number of WB's own addressed what happened this last year on CHARMED regarding Shannen Doherty's exit. The network's Jordan Levin spoke of the matter, saying, "We knew last year that there were some decisions that probably had to be made in the best interest of Aaron Spelling and his company, our company and Shannen. And everybody came to the decision that they felt was mutually beneficial for all parties involved." When asked if the season finale was geared crafted in order to set up the entrance of a replacement for Doherty, Levin says, "We had an idea that we wanted to give ourselves some flexibility." More specifically regarding the addition of Rose McGowan to the cast, Levin adds, "There's a history within the mythology that there could be another sister because of the Lighter. We're still sort of hammering that out, and we haven't heard the full pitch yet and how that's going to work. But we're looking to bring in someone who could provide some conflict within the group and someone who could bring a younger audience into the show. We feel like Rose does that for us."

”I think it’s hard when you put…[long pause]…two very different people together. I’m very laid-back and passive. I have my Buddha,” Milano says, gesturing to a small shrine at the back of her trailer. ”I come in here and meditate. [Shannen’s] got a lot of energy, she’s very headstrong, she wants to get the job done…. I think it’s unfortunate that she left, and that she needed to bad-mouth everyone involved and the audience,” continues Milano, alluding to the former 90210 star’s recent dismissal of Charmed as ”a show for 12-year-olds.” (Doherty declined to comment for this story.) ”She sounds really angry. I just hope I didn’t contribute to that anger.”Shannen’s not the only one who’s miffed. ”It was done very poorly, in my opinion,” says Holly Marie Combs (Piper) of the producers’ postseason decision to allow Doherty to leave the coven. ”We should have had an opportunity to have her character, Prue, make a graceful exit and have our story writers properly plan for that.” Instead, writers were compelled to turn last season’s standard-issue cliff-hanger — Prue and Piper get thrown through a wall by a cranky demon — into a makeshift tragic send-off. ”Now,” adds Combs, ”we’re scrambling to explain why I live and she doesn’t.”

That stuff's hard to wash out. You're even more famous for those MCI commercials. Oh, yeah. Little kids only know me from those spots. They don't know from Who's the Boss? and aren't allowed to watch Charmed. It's a great night job, especially if Charmed doesn't last. Speaking of which... Shannen Doherty? You know, if you remember the way Shannen left Beverly Hills, 90210, it's almost exactly the way it happened on Charmed. She left for personal reasons, then it started coming out that she didn;t get along with the other cast members. It seemed she was so angry and upset over leaving another hit show that she had to lash out at me. Suddenly it's my fault. I think she did the right thing by leaving, but once she left she attacked many people—not only me, our audience, too, and almost everyone on the show. She lost credibility. She was like a bad roommate. There was a lot of tension on the set. I have a fear of confrontation, and she can be aggressive, so I was afraid of her. Shannen doesn't hate you—she hates herself. I haven't been able to figure it out, and I might die not knowing. And that's OK. OK. You and Shannen Doherty in a celebrity death match: Who wins? Sarah Michelle Gellar. 2021:

While Milano said she's still so very proud of Charmed, she didn't always have the easiest time on set, especially when it came to her co-star, Beverly Hills, 90210 alum Shannen Doherty. After years of tension between the two during the show's eight seasons, Milano said she and Doherty are now "cordial." "I would say we are cordial," she shared. "You know, I could take responsibility for a lot of our tension that we had. I think a lot of our struggle came from feeling that I was in competition rather than it being that sisterhood that the show was so much about. And I have some guilt about my part in that." While the 48-year-old actress admitted that she still has some guilt for her part in their feud, their decades-old spat didn't stop her from reaching out to Doherty when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015. 2022/2023: Shannen speaks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHisM0QLPEw&t=85s&ab_channel=Let%27sBeClearwithShannenDohertyPods

So it was interesting that when I had a problem after this all transpired and I wanted to discuss leaving the show and all my reasons why they put me in a room with Jonathan Levin, which I don't know that I had seen since we went to network, and you had told me about your background with him, which is varied and interesting, and he obviously has a very fond spot, shall we say, for you, And I don't know why they chose him to do this meeting, but I can tell you that during the meeting where I said this is not the show I signed on to do, I hear that you're looking for other people. And it's not about the list of names. It's about this was not a show that I wanted to do without Shannon. She didn't want to do it without me. Therefore I don't want to do it without her, and that should be fairly clear. And he hadars in his eyes already because he could see I was getting upset. As you can hear me getting upset, And I said, why would you hire her again just to fire her? And he said, we didn't mean to, And he said, but we've been backed into this corner. He said, you know, we're basically in a position where it's one or the other. We were told that it's her me and Alyssa has threatened to sue us for a hostile workplace environment, which because she went to the therapist or the mediator or the corporate mediator, whatever the heck his title is, she built a case for herself where she was documenting every time she felt uncomfortable on set and for whatever reason, whereas you and I refused to speak to him. So that's where the deck was stacked There was no either even like harsh words exchanged. It was all behind the scenes, it was all in the trailer. It was nothing that anybody or any of our guest stars ever noticed or noted. And you know, there's not a director that would not work with you. Again, there's not any one of our crew members that did not have a great time working with you. So by today's standards, it wouldn't fucking fly, right, And I don't think being laid as a teenager on a set called nine O two one zero would fly for being fired either. Like it's just it's just doesn't make any sense anymore. There are people that actually behave badly and get away with it, and there are men that you know, abuse people, throw things, screaming fits and get away with it. Alyssa/Holly Speak:

Guest stars speak throughout the years:

Michael Bailey Smith aka Belthazor/Shax/Grimlock I did 14 episodes on “Charmed” and had a great time. Whenever I showed up to the set as Belthazor, Alyssa Milano would always give me a kiss on the cheek and say, “You’re not scary.” Holly was really nice too, really down to earth. And I know the rumors about Shannen Doherty, but for me, she was always nice and very professional. I would always see her doing extra work off the set with the stunt people just to make sure her fight scenes looked good. I remember one time when we were preparing for a scene, she got a box of roses from someone. When she opened them, they were dead roses. People can be so cruel. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157836541399125&set=a.404883944124&type=3&theater

Brian Krause (leo)“ I can just tell you that she was the hardest working person on the set. Yes, she could be terse and abrupt, but she wasn’t always wrong, I’ll tell you that.”“She had everybody’s back, she was part of the family, she was the family. And when she left, we all wondered how the show was gonna last, and it’s honestly a miracle that we did and kudos to Holly and Alyssa and Rose [McGowan] that we did, they kept it together. But I have nothing but love for Shannen Doherty.”“Most of those comments come from guys, men in power with money who don’t like to be told what to do by a woman, especially a strong opinionated woman,” he said, adding: “She wasn’t always right, but she stood her ground.”https://www.pedestrian.tv/entertainment/brian-krause-interview/

James L Conway (producer)"Shannen was nice to almost everyday, she had script problems, always nice to the cast, she was the HEART AND SOUL OF CHARMED" That really says it all doesn't it? She viewed Charmed as her baby.Source: Charmed blu ray special feature

Christine Rose (Claire)"It was all with Shannen, and I thought she was absolutely darling. I had worked with her years before on Life Goes on. That was about a boy with a Down’s syndrome, and I was guest-starring as the boy’s teacher. Shannen was on that episode, too, and I was setting them up to be married, for what that might be like. I was new to L.A. then because I’d mostly been on the stage, and I was relatively new to being on camera. And I remember thinking, «This girl is a pro”. So I was aware of how good Shannen was, and she was very nice when I did Charmed. I enjoyed working with her, Holly Marie Combs, I had played her biological mother on Picket Fences. We didn’t get to work together on Charmed, but it was fun just getting to see her again. Otherwise my experience was pretty straightforward.

Actually, one other thing I remember was being at a table and another guest star was having a hard time. In between takes Shannen said something very encouraging and nurturing to her, and I thought she was very nice. So those are my memories, as sparse as they are"Source Unknown via: https://thecharmedcafe.proboards.com/thread/11658/guest-stars-working-shannen-doherty

TW King (andy) I think some of it is rumor, but a lot of it is based on truth because she was young when success hit her. The great thing about Shannen is that she is a total professional and is always prepared, and she expects everyone around her to be at the same level - and I like to think I am the same way, so I respect the way she is around the set. We get things done, things rapidly and according to the script, so I certainly can't complain.Source Unknown via: https://thecharmedcafe.proboards.com/thread/11658/guest-stars-working-shannen-doherty

Scott Steiner (Wrestling W/Demons demon) Steiner is asked about appearing on the TV show "Charmed" while working in WCW. He said that while explaining to Shannen Doherty's stunt double that he would have to put his hand in her crotch to perform a press slam, Shannen came up to him and said that she would do that and when Steiner told her that he would have to put his hand in her crotch, Shannen told him that is why she asked. Steiner says that she was cool and gets a lot of bad press.https://www.rspwfaq.net/2014/05/rf-video-shoot-interview-with-scott.html

Armin Shimerman (The Wizard) "I hated the ladies on "Bewitched"...um...uh..."Charmed!" "Charmed!" And there's a reason they were cast as witches. I...of all the shows I've ever worked, that was by far the ugliest." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zl24cHSS-w (8:10)

Danielle Harris (Aviva) First AC guy was talking to me - Shannen kept walking by, she wasn't very nice to me anyway but she kept getting mad. Wasn't sure what was going on. Wasn't a fun experience. A lot of fighting between the girls. If I pick Shannen, Holly would be mean. If I picked Holly, Shannen would be mean. Alyssa kept telling me what to do as if I didn't know anything. The AC was using me to get back at Shannen. He had been her boyfriend for 1.5 years. Thats why I was getting stink eye.

Scout Compton (Thistle the fairy) I did 7 or 8 episodes and it was interesting. I wasnt on (when Rose was on NOTE: She was only on 1 episode with Shannen. The rest with Rose)The women were always fighting in the makeup trailer.

https://talkscarytome.podbean.com/e/talk-scary-to-me-e9/ (22:00)

Geoffrey Blake (Four horseman) Alyssa was very welcoming. Most of them were except one that wasnt so nice**. (Shannen was largely absent this episode)** https://podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/geoffrey-blake-podcast-apocalypse-not-part-2/id1573860155?i=1000526963557

Elisabeth Hernois ( Brooke in the season 3 episode "Magic Hour"):

The dynamic on set was “interesting,” she said, as she “hadn’t really ever witnessed anything like that on a set — where people really aren’t hiding not liking each other.”

“Definitely as a young person, I sensed the tension on the set,” Harnois, 44, said, noting that her overall experience was “actually really good” as she shouted out Alyssa Milano, who she said “was a sweetheart to me.”

“She really took me under her wing, and a lot of my stuff was with her too, so that was helpful,” she recalled.

Shannen Doherty and Holly Marie Combs, who made up the other ⅔ of the sister witches who led the show, “were nice to me but not as effusively kind as Alyssa was,” Harnois said.

“And they were always off in their own space and [Alyssa] would sit all the way on the other side of the set by herself," she continued. “There was a major divide on that set, even back then, and I don’t think that was that long into the show.” https://people.com/charmed-guest-star-recalls-major-divide-on-set-shannen-doherty-alyssa-milano-8604809

#Charmed #Charmed season 1 #charmed season 2 #charmed season 3 #Shannen Doherty #alyssa milano #holly marie combs #prue halliwell #piper halliwell #phoebe halliwell #celebrity feuds #thewb

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