How That Will & Grace Reunion Actually Came Together

It’s been a decade since Will & Grace has cracked us up on NBC, but as the cast’s surprise reunion video revealed, it was like no time had passed at all.

After teasing us relentlessly with photos of the four major players back in Will and Grace’s apartment filming, well, something, a 10-minute mini-episode finally dropped featuring Eric McCormack, Debra Messing, Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally back in character to debit the merits of 2016 presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And according to Mullally, stepping back into Karen Walker’s boozy brain was as easy as it looked.

“The whole thing felt like we’d just gone on hiatus for a week and we’d just come back. It was just like no time had passed,” she told People. “It was so effortless and fun. We just snapped right back into it, and we were just laughing and having a blast.”

Of course, just because it felt like slipping on a glove doesn’t mean the whole thing wasn’t completely surreal. “It was unbelievable. We went into the studio where we were going to shoot it, and there was the real set with every throw pillow and tchotchke just as it had been. We walked around and were flipping out,” Mullally admitted. “It’s hard to explain, but it’s kind of a contradictory process of being flipped out and excited but also feeling totally normal. It was as if we had just been there.”

As it turns out, Mullally’s beloved character is really who we have to thank for the reunion. “The idea came from [co-creator] Max Mutchnick, who had this idea of Karen having a wall installed in her house to make [her maid] Rosario practice climbing so that when Trump builds the wall, she can get back over it to get to work again,” the actress revealed. “It’s so funny because, during the last year or so when I’ve been asked in interviews, ‘What do you think Karen would be doing now?’ I’ve always said I think she’d be married to Donald Trump.”

With Mutchnick at the helm, it wasn’t long before everybody fell back into their old roles. “Max sent out the email to the four of us. It was great because everybody immediately said that they would do it—I mean everybody: not just the cast but [director] Jim Burrows and all of our department heads, our costume designer, our set designer, everybody, even our line producer and our supervisor—they were all on board,” Mullally said. “So it came together right away.”

For Mullally, the politically-charged mini-episode felt incredibly in step with what Will & Grace would be doing to today were it still on the air. “Will & Grace was always a very topical show and so this was just like a normal episode. And if the show was still on the air, we would be doing episodes about Orlando or we’d be doing episodes about a lot of things,” she said. “It was the right time to [come back together] right before the first debate.”

What did you think of the Will & Grace reunion? Everything you’d hoped it would be? Let us know in the comments below.