Doug Savant recalls “Melrose Place” actor refusing to share gay kiss on cheek: 'He was so uncomfortable'

Doug Savant is opening up about a "shocking" encounter with a Melrose Place actor who was not thrilled about playing a gay character, like Savant's.

"There was an actor I was working with who wasn't as comfortable that he was playing someone who was gay," he told his former costars Laura Leighton, Courtney Thorne-Smith, and Daphne Zuniga on their Still The Place podcast. "I wanted, in an effort to show that [Savant's character Matt Fielding] was behaving with this character in a way that was against his better judgment, I wanted him to steal a kiss at work. Like look around, make sure no one was looking, but kiss this guy in the cheek, just a peck on the cheek."

Like any good actor, Savant was searching for a means of telegraphing his character's inner struggle to the audience without spelling it out for them. The Matt Fielding character grapples with the impact his sexuality has on his life and his treatment at the hands of others throughout Melrose Place. But Savant, who is straight in real life, didn't expect that struggle to extend off screen. He explained, "This other actor was so uncomfortable. He was like, 'That's not in the script, we're not doing that.' He was so uncomfortable with it. I sort of found that shocking."

Savant said that "there were very limited storylines that the network would be comfortable with" vis-à-vis his character's sexuality, "because the advertisers were only comfortable touching on certain things. One of them was the gay bashing, and the other was a kid coming out to his parents."

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Both issues made for impactful, even groundbreaking television. But while violence and conflict stemming from queerness were deemed okay from an advertiser standpoint, queer intimacy was not. "You couldn't show any affection on the show?" Thorne-Smith asked Savant, to which he replied, "No, no, no, no, no, never."

Related: Melrose Place star Doug Savant explains why he refused to come out as straight while playing gay character on TV

"I think we surreptitiously held hands underneath the table," he explained, "we" referring to his character Matt and a character called Jeffrey Lindley (Jason Beghe), a closeted Navy lieutenant who falls in love with Matt in season 2 and insists their relationship be kept secret from his family.

Savant continued, "I think there might have been a shot of us actually holding hands, but that had to be away from public consumption because, by the way, he was in the military and that was our storyline, right? It was Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

It was even confirmed by creator and producer Darren Star at the time that a same-sex kiss was shot and set to air, but ultimately pulled by Fox. "We would never censor ourselves, but I understand their position; they don’t want to lose affiliates, Star told Variety in 1994. "The letters we get from straight and gay viewers are overwhelmingly that we should let this guy have a real life. The viewers are more sophisticated than advertisers."

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Savant remembers the issue "was about palatability. They wanted the character to be palatable. And so if they could say that, well, the actor is really straight, he's just acting, then it became less real to them."

That's what led Savant to refuse to distance himself from his character in public when asked about his own sexuality. Savant still stands up for Matt, and it's his dignified portrayal of the character that etched him into the annals of TV history.

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