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She's been typecast
While Lynette Scavo was undoubtedly the role of a lifetime, it led Felicity Huffman into a longtime struggle with typecasting. "You go into acting jail at the end of these things because it's hard for anyone to see you as anything other than Lynette Scavo or whatever it is," she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2011 (via the Express). "So I think it's unwise to look at the carnage around you of past TV actresses and go, 'It's not going to happen to me.'" Clearly prepared for the days ahead, Huffman joked about her backup plan to open "supermarkets and gas stations." However, it took years for audiences to view the TV star as anyone other than her most popular alter ego.
"You go, 'Oh, there's Lynette. You don't go, 'There's Felicity Huffman,'" she told the Associated Press in 2014 (via Fox News). Explaining how she was looking forward to playing a role that would finally shift this public image, Huffman added, "So you need to be different enough that it's not just, 'Oh, there's Lynette as a doctor. There's Lynette as a cab driver or policeman.'"
American Crime was short-lived
After struggling to find her footing again in television, Huffman's starring role on the anthology crime drama series American Crime allowed her to finally move beyond the realm of Desperate Housewives in 2015. With each season focused on an entirely different story, the actress served up distinctive looks and delivered three standout performances as grieving mother Barb, as private school principal Leslie Graham, and as Jeanette Hesby, a woman who marries into a troubled farming family.
"What was behind it is, I keep wanting to give the audience a break from the last character I played so they could see the new character as complete and whole," Huffman explained to IndieWire in 2017. "I think you feel the history of your career that's come before," she said. "I didn't want them to go, 'Oh, there's Lynette as a grieving mother on American Crime.'"
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