In the seven seasons that Heather Locklear spent on Melrose Place, the vintage 1990s Fox soap opera, she was synonymous with ruthlessness, deviousness and hemlines that rose as high as prime-time television would allow.
So when she returned to a resuscitated version of Melrose Place that began this fall on the CW network, Locklear considered making a few demands. Starting with her skirts.
"They're short," Locklear said in a telephone interview, "and I keep wanting to say, ‘Shorter,' but I have to work into that, because I think wardrobe might be mortified."
It has been nearly 17 years since Locklear, 48, first wriggled her way into the tantalizing garb of Amanda Woodward, the cold-blooded -- or, depending on your perspective, determined -- advertising executive who imbued the original Melrose Place with a sense of backstabbing, hair-pulling purpose.
Locklear knows that not every strategy from her old playbook will work on the new show, which she joins tonight. She's now an unlikely elder stateswoman in a cast of mostly 20-somethings -- not to mention a mom -- and what was risque in her heyday is now tame by even network-television standards. But as she did the first time around, she approaches the over-the-top melodrama with a healthy dose of irony.
As Amanda, Locklear seduced several of the show's male characters, helped orchestrate the buyout of the advertising agency where she worked and drove its ex-president to suicide, overcame lymphoma and faked her own death. The 1999 series finale seemed to suggest that Amanda and a paramour (played by Jack Wagner) were killed in an explosion -- then showed the two walking blissfully on a beach.
"Maybe they always thought, "Oh, we'll do a spinoff,'" Locklear said.
Sure enough, when Smallville producers Darren Swimmer and Todd Slavkin were approached by CW to restart Melrose Place, they said their approach would mostly emphasize a new cast of characters -- with one exception.
"Heather Locklear is so synonymous with the franchise," Slavkin said. "Amanda Woodward is the one character we felt could be folded in, in a much bigger way, to make the show more accessible."
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement