Showrunner John Wells confirms there was a storyline that included Fiona Gallagher, but the actress portraying the character was not able to get to Los Angeles because of lockdown.
- April 13, 2021
AceShowbiz - The COVID lockdown scuppered Emmy Rossum's return to "Shameless" for the series finale. Showrunner John Wells has confirmed there was a storyline that included the actress' character, but Emmy couldn't get to Los Angeles from her home in New York to shoot anything, so the writers had to abandon the idea.
"We were trying to get Emmy and Emmy wanted to come back...," Wells tells The Hollywood Reporter. "Based on what was going on with the pandemic, when we were planning it... the quarantines went back into effect between New York and Los Angeles and it was impossible to figure out how to get her back. It was a very minor but sad result of everything that's happened in the pandemic."
Opening up about an imagined plot including Emmy's Fiona Gallagher, Wells reveals it revolved around her character's father, Frank Gallagher, battling dementia and the family gathering together to sort out his estate.
"The idea was with Frank's dementia being discovered, there's a call and she comes back to help everyone figure it out and that she would come back and be involved at the end with what to do with the house and all that," John shared. "The travel was such a mess that we never got to the point of my actual writing it."
"We put it up on the writers' room board and then took it down a few times... We had a lot of jokes for her but we never actually nailed it down."
Emmy left "Shameless" in 2018, at the end of the ninth season. The series finale, titled "Father Frank, Full of Grace", aired in America on Sunday, April 11.
