Trouble is brewing for the circle once again.
On the latest episode of her podcast Let's Be Clear, Shannen Doherty welcomed her former Charmed co-star Holly Marie Combs to talk about their longtime friendship and their time together on the WB series. The two even went into some of the smallest details of the show's infamous behind-the-scenes drama that fueled Doherty's exit after Season 3.
During season two, Doherty claims that Alyssa Milano and her mother tried to separate Combs from Doherty. “It was really interesting [her] “I’m trying to pull you away from me,” she said. Combs and Doherty were close friends before being cast on Charmed, and Combs even lived with Doherty after she split from her first husband, Bryan Travis Smith.
Holly Marie Combs, Shannen Doherty, Alyssa Milano on “Charmed.”
Richard Cartwright/The WB Television Network/Everett
Season 2 brought many challenges for the core trio. Doherty struggled with her father's illness, which forced him to “constantly travel in and out of the hospital,” while Combs herself struggled with health issues that required surgery to remove a potentially cancerous tumor from her uterus.
Doherty struggled with her own trauma of accompanying her father to the hospital and found the strength to visit Combs after her surgery, leading to a pause in filming the second season. However, Doherty claims that Milano and her mother did not allow anyone to visit Combs.
“Hospitals scared the crap out of me. I waited 24 hours after your surgery to go and then it wasn't even easy for me to get in. I felt like I was being told I couldn't even get in,” Doherty said. “Alyssa and her mother stopped people from seeing you, and you didn’t know it at the time. I remember you texting me, 'Dude, will you come to me?'”
Doherty was devastated when she received Combs' message and felt guilty because Combs was under the impression that Doherty had abandoned her. “I also felt my anger at the situation, that I wasn't allowed to come to you and some kind of family had shown up,” Doherty added. “[It] caused a strange rift between the two of us that lasted throughout the second season. I think I cried every night.”
Combs admitted that her own difficult childhood led her to seek refuge with Milano's family when they took her in. “I think it was pretty obvious that I was raised by teenage parents and didn't have a big family. So you're right when.” “A family came over and tried to basically adopt me. That was very tempting to me,” Combs said. “I also wanted everyone to get along, I wanted the show to be successful. There were no angels, there were no demons. All of us.” “We've had bad days, we've all had good days. We all could have behaved better in certain areas, but there was a lack of awareness of the bigger picture.”
There have been rumors of a behind-the-scenes feud over the years, particularly after Doherty left Charmed, suggesting that her co-stars weren't as hard-working as she was. “I want to work with actors who really, really care and want to be there every day,” Doherty told Entertainment Tonight. “I don’t want to work with people who bitch about their job, complain about it, and say they hate it or anything else.”
In the following years there were various reconciliations. Combs and Doherty remain close friends and even appeared on the reality travel show Off the Map With Shannen & Holly in 2015. In 2017, Milano said that she and Doherty had reconciled. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight in 2021, Milano took responsibility for how her competitiveness contributed to strained off-screen relationships.
“You know, I could take responsibility for a lot of the tension that we had,” Milano told Entertainment Tonight. “I think a lot of our struggle came from feeling like I was in competition, rather than the sisterhood that the show was so much about. And I feel a certain amount of guilt about my part in it.”
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