Morgan Fairchild has shared some hilarious behind-the-scenes memories of working with Cybill Shepherd on the hit ’90s sitcom ‘Cybill‘. Their characters constantly fought onscreen, but some scenes were trickier than they looked.
Fairchild recently revealed how Shepherd once threw her character over a cliff and why she refused to let a stunt double take her place. Turns out, the actress was ready to go all in for a good laugh!
Morgan Fairchild Recalls Her Wild Scenes With Cybill Shepherd
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Fairchild looked back on her time on Cybill, the CBS sitcom Chuck Lorre created. The series ran for four seasons from 1995 to 1998 and starred Shepherd as Cybill Sheridan, a struggling Hollywood actress whose life drew inspiration from Shepherd’s own experiences.
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Fairchild appeared in four episodes as Andrea Thorpe, a rival actress who also became an enemy of Cybill’s best friend, Maryann Thorpe, played by Christine Baranski. Things got even more entertaining when Andrea married Maryann’s never-seen plastic-surgeon ex-husband, Dr. Dick, who frequently caused trouble despite never appearing onscreen.
One particularly memorable episode featured Andrea and Cybill getting into a massive food fight at Andrea’s wedding. Fairchild recalled, “I think Cybill liked me because I was always game for anything,” before sharing how Shepherd came up with the idea.
“Cybill came up to me maybe a day or two into rehearsal. She says, ‘I have an idea,’ and I said, ‘Yeah?’ And she said, ‘Food fight,’ and I said, ‘Okay. She said, ‘You’re game for a food fight?’ I said, ‘Oh yeah, I love food fights. I love doing stupid s— that people don’t expect to see you do.’ So we had the food fight all choreographed and everything, and we had a great time,” Fairchild recalled.
The Wedding Food Fight Was Trickier Than It Looked
Although the scene looked like pure fun, filming it required some careful planning. Fairchild wore a white wedding dress, and the production team prepared three identical gowns for the shoot in front of a live studio audience. Every messy moment needed proper timing because one mistake meant starting again.
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“Here’s where the avocado is going to go. Where the soup’s going to go. Where the chocolate mousse is going to go. And you do each bit up to a certain point. ‘Did we get that all right? Okay. Now we can move on.’ You know, if we screw it up, we got to go change into the outfit and start all over again. Fix the hair. Fix the makeup,” she explained. “Did you get guacamole in your hair? We got to fix that.’”
However, Fairchild felt especially proud of the scene’s ending, where Andrea fell backward into a raised pond. The actress had to walk backward in heels on artificial grass while wearing a wedding dress with a long train. The rectangular pool measured only three or four feet across, leaving very little room for mistakes.
“It’s very tricky because I am having to back up on astroturf in heels with a wedding dress with a train and land, without looking, absolutely land perfectly in there because if I’m off-kilter a little way I’m going to break my skull,” she said. Luckily, everything worked out perfectly. As Fairchild proudly recalled, “I did it on the first take.”
The wedding fight wasn’t the only time Fairchild and Shepherd got physical onscreen. Another episode featured an even wilder confrontation on Cybill’s terrace, which overlooked the Hollywood Hills. “There’s a scene going on in the living room, and out on the terrace behind the living room, the audience can see that she and I are having this big catfight, and she throws me over the cliff,” Fairchild shared.
The production team wanted a stuntwoman to perform the fall, arguing that “the audience will never know.” However, Fairchild, with a martial arts background, wasn’t willing to hand over the moment. She wanted the live audience to see her perform the stunt herself.
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