‘Will & Grace’ Star Eric McCormack Recalls How Former Manger Told Him To Lose Weight

Eric McCormack was once told by his former manager to lose weight for an audition.

McCormack looks good for his age. He appears dashing on “Will & Grace.” However, according to him, in 1997, his manager asked him to lose weight ahead of an audition. McCormack shared the incident during a remote interview for 92Y.

“It’s very easy in a Calgary winter when you have a beard and several layers of clothing to disguise what beer will do to a man,” the 57-year-old star said (via Us Weekly).

“And when the beard came off — Wow! I was not going to be on ‘Melrose Place’ the next day, let’s put it that way and I was in denial about it.”

At the time, McCormack was auditioning for a role on Jenny McCarthy’s show “Jenny.” His then-manager, Joan Hyler, commented on his looks because he had a fuller face and asked him to “get your face back.”

“I’d gone in and I’d done really well and it looked like it was going to go my way but the next audition — the final audition — wasn’t for two weeks,” McCormack continued.

“My manager at the time … God bless her, she said, ‘You’ve got two weeks … get your face back.'”

McCormack successfully landed the pilot for “Jenny.” He also shared that the comment he received from his former manager was a “very big turning point” because when he appeared on the pilot, “I had discovered the new unbearded me.”

Meanwhile, in the latest episode of PeopleTV’s “Couch Surfing,” McCormack looked back at the most memorable events in the series which included Will (McCormack) and Jack’s (Sean Hayes) kiss in the second season. It was the first gay kiss on the network.

“That was special for lots of reasons. Obviously, it was a great big gay kiss on network TV. And the fact that it was so meta, that it wasn't just two men kissing. It was Will and Jack, on purpose, kissing each other in order to make a point,” McCormack said about the episode.

McCormack added that when they took the characters and put them in the real world of New York, it became easier for people to relate to them.