James Denton, who famously starred as Mike Delfino in Desperate Housewives, strangely got a kick out of his character’s death, ironically breaking several viewers’ hearts at the time. Speaking to People magazine, the actor admitted that getting shot on screen was “a lot of fun” and that the episode is his favorite to date.
“The one where I got shot,” he said, speaking of the episode he loved from the ABC comedy-drama. “It’s always fun to get chills on camera,” he added. The actor further shared some behind-the-scenes details of when one of the beloved on-screen characters was shot in season 8, episode 16.
His character Mike, Susan Mayer’s (Teri Hatcher) partner in the series, was killed in a drive-by shooting in front of his fictional home on Wisteria Lane. Denton revealed that filming the scene involved special effects and a tubing rig to emulate blood.
“You have one tube up one leg of your pants that has the blood to your chest, and you have a wire running down the other leg,” the actor said, adding that a guy is hiding in the bushes with a detonator to set off the blast. “And you can only do it about two or three times, and that’s the whole day,” he recalled.
But jokes apart, the scene was equally intense and emotional to film for Denton, especially filming Mike’s final moments with his wife Susan. In the scene, he pushed her out of the way, took the bullet, and saved her life.
Denton recalled filming that scene with co-star Teri Hatcher, calling her performance “brilliant.” He recalled lying on her lap and bleeding out while a big crane shot the sequence from above, as there were no drones at the time.
“She’s just sobbing uncontrollably. And she did it all day long. And it was so hard for me not to break up and cry because she was so heartbreaking,” he added. The actor admitted that Mike’s survival for so long in the series was shocking, considering the amount of characters that were killed throughout the show’s run.
“The guys joked the entire run, ‘Who was gonna get killed,’ you know,” he revealed, explaining that the show was known for being “salacious,” but there were fewer sex scenes and a lot more murder. “We killed 56 characters,” he added.
