Rumors started going around last week that Ugly Betty’s Rebecca Romijn wouldn’t be returning to the show as a series regular next season. Unfortunately, it looks like those rumors are true. While Romijn’s character will be back in a recurring capacity, her character is being put on the back burner.
Romijn told The New York Post, “They made a tremendous amount of changes, especially with the writing staff [during the writer's strike]. And while I know I'll be coming back next season, with all the changes, I'm not sure they can take care of my character they way they have been. So I'll be leaving, back in a recurring capacity, but time for me to leave and find something else.”
In Ugly Betty, Romijn plays the transsexual sibling of Daniel Meade (Betty’s magazine-editing boss), Alexis. She was introduced part way through the first season and caused some drama when she plotted with Wilhelmina (Vanessa Williams) to take over the magazine.
Both TV Guide’s Ausiello and E!’s Kristin Dos Santos confirmed that this is true. Dos Santos went on to say that her sources say, “It was specifically the firing of executive producer Marco Pennette on the day the strike ended that led to the diminishment of Rebecca's role.”
Now I’ll be honest, when Romijn’s character was first introduced on the show, I wasn’t crazy about her. The whole idea of Daniel’s supposedly dead brother coming back as a woman just seemed a bit overly dramatic and an unnecessary distraction from the central story of the show but I quickly grew to love Alexis as a character and appreciate the way Romijn played the role. So needless to say, the news that her character’s being pushed aside is disappointing. It’s not often that a TV series features a transsexual as one of the main characters but Romijn managed to bring both humor and hear t to the role, which fit in really well with the show.
