Keeping it professional. William H. Macy has stood by wife Felicity Huffman throughout the college admissions scandal, but when he goes to work on Shameless, the 69-year-old actor leaves all the personal struggles at home.
“He’s family. He’s the patriarch, and so it’s been nothing but support. He’s been amazing,” Steve Howey, who plays Kevin in Shameless, told Us Weekly exclusively at the Make A Wish Greater Los Angeles Gala on Wednesday, November 20. “He’s never brought anything to work. It’s all about the work. That’s part of the responsibility, as a professional, is that you don’t bring your baggage to work. But he’s managed it very well.”
Huffman, 56, who has been married to Macy since 1997, completed her 11-day stint in prison last month and began her 250 hours of community service, after pleading guilty to fraud charges in connection to the nationwide scandal. She was also sentenced to a year of supervised release and ordered to pay a $30,000 fine.
The Desperate Housewives alum was arrested in March along with a dozen other parents and was accused of paying $15,000 to alter her 19-year-old daughter Sophia’s SAT scores. While Macy was not involved, he has been by his wife’s side through it all. That said, when it comes time to film the Showtime drama, the mood is light on set.
“It’s very impressive how sane he is in a pretty insane time,” the Reba alum, 42, told Us. “We’ve had his back, we give him support and he knows it. But the other side of that support is not to [say], you know, ‘woe is you’ and ‘Oh my God, you’re going through that.’ We still bust his balls, and it keeps the levity.”
Ahead of Huffman’s sentencing, 27 of her friends and family members — including Macy and Eva Longoria — wrote letters to the judge to argue she should receive no more than the recommended sentence.
“Felicity worried about raising our girls in Hollywood with working actors for parents, so we decided to keep them as far away from our business as possible. We rarely took them to any sort of Hollywood event and tried to avoid them being photographed by the press,” the two-time Emmy winner wrote in his letter. “Every good thing in my life is because of Felicity Huffman.”
Shameless airs on Showtime Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.
With reporting by Emily Marcus
