“I was fired from ‘Desperate Housewives,’” Jesse Metcalfe, who starred as hunky gardener John Rowland in Season 1 of the ABC series, said on Tuesday’s episode of Amanda Hirsch’s “Not Skinny But Not Fat” podcast.
“After the first season they didn’t really know where else to take my storyline,” he explained.
In the show — which ran for eight seasons from 2004 until 2012 — Metcalfe, now 47, portrayed a teen who was having an affair with Eva Longoria’s character, Gabrielle Solis.
“Our creator, Marc Cherry, was like, ‘This isn’t Desperate House Gardeners, This is Desperate Housewives, so unfortunately you’re not going to be a series regular moving forward on the show,’” Metcalfe said on the podcast.
“At that time I had been offered [the lead role in] ‘John Tucker Must Die’ from 20th Century Fox, so I was like, hey, cool, no big deal. I’m going to be a movie star.”
“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,” he recalled.
After he was let go from the ABC show, the actor was brought back as an intermittent guest star in several of the following seasons.
Metcalfe’s performance as the steamy young gardener quickly catapulted the celebrity to heartthrob status and earned him three Teen Choice Award nominations in 2005 for TV actor, TV breakout performance and choice hottie.
He took home the trophy for breakout star.
In 2021, Metcalfe revealed that breaking out as a sex symbol on “Desperate Housewives” left him feeling pressured to keep up his physique.
“Being a sex symbol is very much about the roles that you play and my roles put me up on a pedestal,” he told Vice’s i-D magazine at the time.
“But my appearance was also criticized and picked apart by a lot of people in the media. Having your shirt off in every episode of ‘Housewives’ brought a lot of pressure.”
“You have to stay in the best shape you can and then between projects, everyone expects you to stay in that shape 24/7, 365,” he continued. “That’s not realistic. That’s why paparazzi catch actors between projects looking ‘out of shape’ — they’re taking time off and that includes the gym.”
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