Drea de Matteo had quite the journey from cameo to series regular on Sons of Anarchy — and her role on Desperate Housewives was involved.
“Sons was always meant to be a cameo on the pilot, and that was it,” de Matteo, 52, told Us Weekly exclusively while promoting the relaunch of her ULTRAFREE clothing line. “When I said yes to doing the show, they wanted to keep me. And I was like, ‘Sure, I would love to.’ I was like, ‘Who am I going to be?’”
De Matteo appeared in the Sons of Anarchy pilot in September 2008 as Jax Teller’s (Charlie Hunnam) pregnant ex-wife, Wendy Case. After the show “tested through the roof” on FX, the team behind the show asked for her to stay onboard.
“FX comes back and they’re like, ‘Well, we’d like you to stay, but we don’t really need you, so we’re going to cut your pay in half.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t think so,’” she recalled to Us. “So, I went and did Desperate Housewives.”
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When the sixth season of Desperate Housewives premiered in September 2009, de Matteo made her debut as new neighbor Angie Bolen. However, while she was on the ABC show, the actress became “f—ing obsessed” with Sons of Anarchy — so she asked for her job back, leading to a recurring role starting in season 4.
“I wrote [creator] Kurt [Sutter] and I go, ‘You want me to come back? I’ll do it for nothing.’ It wasn’t him. It was FX that was strong arming me in the beginning,” de Matteo explained. “I came back and it was for very small pay, but I wasn’t always in Los Angeles so I couldn’t always show up.”
For the Sons of Anarchy seventh and final season, de Matteo was upped to series regular.
“[Kurt] was like, ‘Look, FX is going to pay you, and you need to be in town for a month. I was like, ‘OK, I’ll do it,’” she shared. “He’s like, ‘I want to end the story with you.’ I was like, ‘Wow.’ That’s a turn, everybody hated Wendy, but OK. She redeems herself.”
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The Sons of Anarchy season finale, which aired in December 2014, showed de Matteo’s Wendy taking Jax’s sons, Abel (who just found out she was his biological mother) and Thomas, to leave the town of Charming with Nero (Jimmy Smits).
“I’m the only living SOA character,” she told Us. “Me and the kids.”
Now, de Matteo is taking her legacy from iconic TV shows and turning into the ULTRAFREE clothing line.
“Our whole thing is just trying to make freedom cool again,” she explained to Us. “The whole concept of freedom lately has sort of been pushed over to the right of politics when it was always on the left. We need to get balanced and get back together and be in the middle — hold hands and huddle down.”
The message-based clothing line is “fun and goofy,” but de Matteo told Us that it’s a reminder “we just need to come back together.”
