‘Melrose Place’ star Doug Savant on why his gay character couldn’t show affection: “They wanted the character to be palatable”
I wanted, in an effort to show that [Savant’s character Matt Fielding] was behaving with this character in a way that was against his better judgment, I wanted him to steal a kiss at work.
Like look around, make sure no one was looking, but kiss this guy in the cheek, just a peck on the cheek.This other actor was so uncomfortable.
He was like, ‘That’s not in the script, we’re not doing that.’ He was so uncomfortable with it. I sort of found that shocking.There were very limited storylines that the network would be comfortable with [about the character’s sexuality] because the advertisers were only comfortable touching on certain things.
One of them was the gay bashing, and the other was a kid coming out to his parents.[As far as showing affection] No, no, no, no, no, never.
