William H. Macy says he wept for 12 hours straight on the set of 'Pleasantville': 'I guess I had some issues'

No one in the Northeast or Midwest will cry for William H. Macy when he gripes about how cold he was shooting the Gary Ross-directed 1998 favorite Pleasantville… in Malibu.

But hear him out. He was shooting the memorable scene where his character, George Parker, arrives home one night befuddled to find his wife isn’t home — and there’s no dinner waiting for him.

“It was two nights of shooting in Malibu in January. It was cold,” Macy told us during a 2018 Role Recall interview about shooting the fantasy comedy, released in theaters 25 years ago, on Oct. 23, 1998. “And I had never seen so many rain trees. They had these giant construction cranes, I think there were three of them, holding piping as big as this room, and pumping thousands of gallons of water through these things. And they had built a street, so I could walk almost a block. So I’d walk out of the house and within two seconds, my underwear was soaked, I was completely soaked, that’s how hard the rain was coming down. I froze to death, and we did take after take after take, and I screamed my voice away, ‘Where’s my dinner?!’ It turned into [King] Lear at a point. I’m on my knees screaming.”

But when he went to the premiere of the film, which starred Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon as siblings who are sucked into a 1950s black-and-white sitcom, Macy (who played their new all-American dad) was in for a surprise.

“Gary was behind me. And he pulls on my coat and goes, ‘Oh, I had to trim up that scene.’ Then I saw the film. I walk out of the house, I look up and go, ‘Where’s my dinner?’ Cut! That was it. The rest of it never made it into the movie.”

Macy’s drenching was hardly the toughest moment for him on set, though.

“It was scripted that I look at my wife and a tear roll down and you can see color,” the actor, now 73, recalled of the sequence where he and Joan Allen’s Betty have an awakening. “That’s when my character starts to get life in him. It was a big scene, and a big moment, and it was a huge setup. Gary had every toy in there known to man to shoot this thing. … I went to Gary and said, ‘I can do this. But I can’t do it all day. You’ve got to tell me when the money shot is. I can make myself cry, but it’s not my strong suit. So tell me when we get to it.’ Gary said, ‘OK, let’s just hear what it sounds like. Let’s just read the lines.’

“And I burst into tears, and I wept for 12 hours. I just could not stop crying all day.”

Macy pauses, then adds: “I guess I had some issues.”