Dean Cain was asked about rumors that his former costar Teri Hatcher was allegedly difficult to work with on set.
During the Tuesday, May 6, episode of the “Inside of You” podcast, host Michael Rosenbaum asked Cain, 58, about his time on screen with Hatcher, 60, while they filmed Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
“[After I was cast, we had a chemistry read]. The last one they said was Teri. They go, ‘Teri wants you to go and run lines with her.’ No other girl had asked me to run lines,” Cain recalled. “She’s in this room and she goes, ‘You don’t like me, do you? We were at the network together. You never talked to me. You didn’t say hi to me.’”
Cain said he was taken aback by their first interaction, adding, “I go, ‘You didn’t say hi to me either. I was just trying to get a job. They never paired us up. I had no reason to talk to you.’ But that right there was the relationship between Lois and Clark. Lois drove the series and that was her.”
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While reflecting on the show’s legacy, Cain acknowledged that Hatcher was “the best” choice to play Lois Lane. Rosenbaum, 52, then asked Cain whether Hatcher was easy to work with when they filmed the superhero series from 1993 to 1997.
“Sometimes [it was] the greatest thing in the world and sometimes a lot more difficult. There were times where we had great chemistry. There were times where it was just the easiest thing in the world,” Cain noted. “I’m a team guy. I’m real simple. Plug me in and let’s go. I’m here to get this done as fast as we can.”
According to Cain, he had a different filming approach compared to Hatcher. Rosenbaum questioned whether Cain was “excited to be there and sometimes maybe she wasn’t.”
“I guess that could be that. But also, it seemed like I just wanted to finish and go home. I almost feel like she didn’t,” Cain said. “There were times where I felt like, ‘I don’t think she wants to go home because she’s worried about this one little thing that has nothing to do with what we’re doing. And that’s slowing us down for two and a half hours. Like, I don’t understand.’”
Cain explained that Hatcher had a specific attention to detail, adding, “It was the way somebody did something or this or that. It was things that I guess make sense. She had her own makeup done in her trailer. Her makeup people couldn’t touch anybody else. [Meanwhile] I’m in the trailer with everybody there. I didn’t care. There wasn’t a thing for me.”
Despite their differences, Cain made it clear that Hatcher “carried the show.”
“I just got to react off her. It worked wonderfully. It was a great pairing,” he gushed. “She was an icon and I still think — no offense to anybody else’s Lois Lane — but I still think she’s the best Lois Lane of all time.”
Cain went on to clarify that there were no current issues between him and Hatcher.
“We’re still very friendly. We didn’t have a big [falling out]. There was no like, ‘I’m not talking to her,’” he noted. “There was a time she wasn’t talking to me for a short time. But I’m an athlete, man. If there’s guys on my football team, we’re going to hash it out so that we can still play ball together.”
Elsewhere during the podcast episode, Cain told an anecdote that was meant to show another moment he didn’t fully understand Hatcher but respected her as a costar.
“We got picked up for a fifth season. So we went in [to Warner Bros.] and there were two huge big screen TVs. We were told, ‘Congratulations, we got picked up for fifth year and here’s a gift for you.’ Teri didn’t like that there was a TV,” he shared. “She was like, ‘Give me something I could use. I would rather [have] something I could use.”
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Cain continued: “So she leaves after a moment and I turn and go, ‘I’ll take that TV. If she doesn’t want it, I’ll take both.’”
The actor’s comments about working with Cain come after rumors previously floated around about behind-the-scenes feuds between cast members on the set of Desperate Housewives, which Hatcher filmed after Lois & Clark.
Longoria has since questioned the narrative, sharing on the “Armchair Expert” podcast in November 2023, “I remember even back then it was a narrative about women. Because there were all these shows with men on the air, and nobody was like, ‘They’re fighting!’”
The actress expressed gratitude to her costars.
“They all had such a better handle on fame, on that narrative. I’m like, ‘[People] are saying we’re fighting.’ They’re like, ‘Well, that’s just a narrative they do on women because we’re over 40 on a television show.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ I wasn’t even that smart to understand that,” Longoria continued. “Anything that happened outside the show, we were like, ‘What?’ We could never come up for air to really get outside of ourselves. We were only on the set. … I remember that noise being outside of us. We were in such a bubble with our crew and each other.”
