BH90210's Shannen Doherty Reveals Luke Perry's Death Changed Her Mind About Participating in the 'Reboot': 'I Definitely Wasn't Going to Do It'

Dave Nemetz

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Twenty years after Beverly Hills, 90210 signed off, the cast is back with a whole new series set in the same old ZIP code — minus one key cast member, of course.

The original 90210 stars have reunited for a very meta sequel series, BH90210 (debuting tonight at 9/8c on Fox), which sees the veteran actors playing exaggerated versions of themselves as they work together to pitch a fresh TV version of 90210. That includes Shannen Doherty, who says she had no intention of participating in the series… until the recent death of co-star Luke Perry.

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“I definitely wasn’t going to do it,” Doherty told reporters at the Television Critics Association summer press tour on Wednesday. “I knew that the show would get sold and do well with or without me. They didn’t need me. So it just wasn’t, at that moment, what I wanted to be doing.” But “when Luke passed away, things drastically changed for me, and I felt like it was a great opportunity to honor him.”

Doherty now says that she’s “really glad I made that decision, because now I get to sit up here with a lot of people that I respect and I love… we went on this amazing journey together where we also got to really sort of heal through losing somebody who means the world to all of us.”

The cast also revealed that Perry was involved in the original discussions with Fox about BH90210. “We had had conversations with him about it, yes, and he was fully in support of it,” co-star Jennie Garth said, while noting that Perry was still under contract with Riverdale when the show was being pitched, so he wouldn’t have been a full-time cast member.

But “we talked about him actually guesting on the show,” co-star Gabrielle Carteris added. “He had been a part of some of the conversations we actually had as a group when we were at the studio.”

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