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By India McCarty
Connie Britton recently revealed she and co-star Kyle Chandler had a major hand in their FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS’ characters’ strong marriage.
“[Kyle and I] agreed,” she told TODAY. “Right at the outset, we were like, ‘No matter what, we can’t let them make either one of us have an affair!’”
Britton and Chandler played married couple Tami and Eric Taylor on the popular high school football drama.
“We wanted it to be about — they really tried [to do an infidelity plot line],” Britton continued. “We really pushed right back on it. We wanted it to be about partnership and collaboration and making mistakes but always going back to each other.”
While attending the recent FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS 20-year reunion, the pair spoke further about the work they put in to create a strong and realistic on-screen marriage.
“We agreed very early on,” Britton recalled. “In the first night that we shot together, we went out to dinner for Japanese food and we talked about what was important to us about marriage and relationships.”
Chandler added, “As I recall it, we had a dinner to try to get to know one another…I realized, she’s funny, she thought I was funny.”
“Somewhere in the midst of that, we both were like, ‘We don’t want our characters to have affairs, we don’t want it about pitting the two of them against each other,’” Britton continued. “Because most marriages, the couples just try to make it work with each other and get through life with each other and we really wanted to show a picture of that kind of marriage as opposed to the very overdramatized. And we did say to the writers, ‘Don’t do that.’”
Britton, who also played a version of Tami Taylor in the 2004 movie FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS was based on, told Parade last year that she initially passed on reprising her role in the show.
“In the film, there was very little for me to do and even less so by the time it came out — whatever I had done was mostly on the cutting-room floor,” she shared. “And so when the TV show came around, I said, ‘No, thank you.’ I was really hoping for something more for myself than playing sort of the fly-on-the-wall wife character in a football show.”
However, the showrunner was “very persuasive,” and Britton agreed to sign on — as long as she got to have a say in her character’s development.
“I really have to say, I worked pretty tirelessly with Pete [Berg, the showrunner], but then also with Jason Katims, who came in to run the show, really sort of standing up for the woman’s voice in that community, in that world,” she said.
Britton and Chandler’s decision to fight for their on-screen marriage to stay strong created one of TV’s most popular couples.
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