Sweet Magnolias Cast Breaks Down That ‘Brutal’ Season 3 Fight: We ‘Didn’t Even Want to Look Each Other in the Eye’
Worst. Margarita night. Ever.
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If you’ve binged your way through the fifth episode of Sweet Magnolias‘ third season, you know exactly what we’re here to discuss. And if you haven’t, turn back now, because we’re entering serious spoiler territory.
After basking in the Magnolias’ aspirational friendship for the past two seasons, we couldn’t imagine anything capable of severing their seemingly unbreakable bond. Enter, or rather re-enter, Ryan Wingate, who skyrocketed to the top of our list of least-favorite characters this season. (You got lucky, Bill!)
Anyway, the ladies’ weekly get-together went down in flames (to put it mildly) when the topic of conversation turned to Helen and Ryan’s relationship — specifically when Maddie, defying every visual cue from a frantic Dana Sue, dared to ask if Helen was actually happy. What followed was a devastating argument between the Magnolias, one which ended with Helen fully breaking down and telling her best friends to leave her home.
“We knew there was inevitably going to have to be this real moment that we had to explore and share with the audience,” JoAnna Garcia Swisher tells TVLine of the mounting tension in the first half of the season.
But that doesn’t mean any of the cast was happy about it. In fact, we discussed the scene with all three Magnolias, including Heather Headley and Brooke Elliott, who used words like “grueling” and “brutal” to describe the experience of fighting with their on-screen and real-life friends.
Read on for the stars’ candid thoughts about this shocking turn of events, then drop a comment with your own thoughts on the Magnolias’ melee below.
“The first time I read it in the script, I was taken aback,” Headley says, though not for the reason you might think. “I remember calling the writer. I was like, ‘Come on, if there’s going to be a fight, can one of them do it? I don’t want [Helen] to be the catalyst. Let it not be on me.”
Unfortunately, Helen remained very much the catalyst for the Magnolias’ war of words, and Headley felt the weight of it even before the cameras started rolling.
“We walked in that day we all kind of went to our corners,” she recalls. “Normally when we walk in for margarita nights, it really feels like a margarita night. That poor crew is like, ‘How long are these girls going to sit here and talk about stuff?’ This time, we knew we were coming together to do this fight. There was a part of us that didn’t even want to look each other in the eye. We didn’t want to fight, and we also knew that it was going to take four or five hours to film the scene. It was taxing and it hurt.”
“It was really uncomfortable,” Swisher says of having to film the scene, which she remembers as a “really grueling day” on set. “It just felt awful. It was a hard day, and it wasn’t fun.”
Swisher normally enjoys filming the Magnolias’ margarita nights (“It’s just us girls!”), but this one was “brutal,” she says. “It starts in this lighter space, then it catastrophically changes. You just never know when the explosion is going to happen.”
“And the way our shooting schedule worked out, we didn’t get to all be together again for a really long time after that,” she adds. “We didn’t have margarita nights for a minute, which stunk.”
In the end, though, Swisher is glad that the Magnolias said what was on their minds, even if it created an enormous chasm between them.
“I think it’s a really important moment, especially for their friendship,” she says. “It leads to a lot of self-realization. It was a necessary evil, but it wasn’t fun.”
Elliott is also choosing to accentuate the positive, concluding that the Magnolias’ fight was “for the best,” adding that the “well-earned” emotional moment paved the way for important growth.
“When there are challenges outside, you can look within and grow through that,” she says. “And I think they all do.” Still, she doesn’t deny that the scene was “jarring” to watch “because we’ve never seen them battle like that.”
There’s also the aftermath to get through. “The overall feeling of it was heavy and hard,” she says of filming the follow-up episodes with the Magnolias still at odds. (That’s right, people. This fight isn’t going to be resolved right away!)
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