Cress Williams Was Will & Grace’s Fifth Cast Member — Here’s What Happened

When NBC’s Will & Grace went to tape its pilot back in 1998, Cress Williams was a fifth member of the cast.

Alas, the future Black Lightning got zapped midway during taping.

In the course of revisiting the sitcom’s pilot with Sean Hayes on their Just Jack & Will podcast, Eric McCormack revealed that, including them and Debra Messing and Megan Mullally, “There were five characters as regulars, and the fifth was my partner in my small law firm” — a “straight guy” and friend of Will’s who would serve as the “opposite” of Hayes’ Jack.

“I think [he was] written probably as Jewish, and yet in the end it was Cress Williams,” McCormack said.

Not long into production on the pilot, however, esteemed sitcom director James Burrows decided that five was a crowd.

Per McCormack, “It was just one of those things where, two days in — and I wasn’t aware of this, I’m not thinking with this kind of critical eye or ear — Jimmy just went to the boys” (presumably Will & Grace co-creators Max Mutchnick and David Kohan) “and said, ‘It’s just too many. It’s one finger too many. These four are the show.'”

“I felt so terrible,” McCormack shared. “It was nothing he did or didn’t do. It was just kind of like my character on the Jenny McCarthy show the year before.” (McCormack had been cast as the male lead on the NBC sitcom, but got cut after shooting the pilot.) It just didn’t fit what the show was supposed to be.”

What do you think of that “almost” casting on the long-running, once-revived Will & Grace? Would you have been curious to see Williams’ straight lawyer character in the mix?