For all 11 seasons of Married… with Children, Amanda Bearse portrayed Marcy D’Arcy, the show’s bumbling every-American schlub protagonist Al Bundy’s neighbor (and arch-nemesis). Marcy, a feminist yuppie who was perpetually the target of Al’s jokes, believed she was the superior being but frequently found herself descending to his level. Bearse was very different from her on-screen persona off the screen. She was focused on establishing a career as a lesbian woman at an era when Hollywood was ruled by men and she was determined to be successful both in front of and behind the camera. Find out what happened to her when the sitcom ended and what she thinks of the show now by continuing to read.
Married… with Children wasn’t Bearse’s first acting role. She came to New York City in the late 1970s to attend the Neighborhood Playhouse, a Manhattan acting school, before making her way to Los Angeles in 1981. She was born in Florida and raised in Atlanta. She had a part on the well-known daytime series All My Children by 1982.
After graduating that program in 1983, she started working on movies like the iconic horror classic Fright Night and the low-budget teen sex comedy Fraternity Vacation, which included Tim Robbins in a cameo role.
She participated in the TV movies Goddess of Love and Here Come the Munsters, as well as the action thriller The Doom Generation, directed by Gregg Araki, while performing on Married… with Children, which lasted from 1987 to 1997.
After the humor was over, she stepped behind the camera.
Bearse appeared to vanish from TV screens after Married… with Children ended, but that was on purpose. She began a plan to go from acting to working behind the camera during the sixth season of the show and became the first cast member to helm an episode. By the end of the series, she had directed 31 episodes of her own show.
Bearse stated in 2020, “I ceased acting after Married… with Children, and that was on design. My second career as a television director was launched by [the show].
Veronica’s Closet, The Jamie Foxx Show, Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place, Jesse (including her former co-star Christina Applegate), Dharma & Greg, and Reba are just a few of the popular sitcoms that Bearse has directed episodes of. She also directed every episode of The Big Gay Sketch Show, which was produced by Rosie O’Donnell and aired on the Logo network from 2007 to 2010, as well as 21 episodes of the comic sketch show MADtv.
She told GLAAD in 2021 that “at the time I was one of very few women who were behind the camera in television, and it was a very different time.” “Despite the difficulty, I was happy for the opportunity. The majority of people in Hollywood are still white men, but today there are more women, LGBTQ, and people of color voices.”
Years before Ellen, she came out of the closet.
Bearse became the first actor on a primetime network television series to come out as homosexual in 1993, four years before Ellen DeGeneres famously came out to the world on her self-titled sitcom and the cover of Time. Bearse did this in the cover story of the September 21, 1993 issue of The Advocate.
She hadn’t spoken her sexuality in public despite the fact that she had been out to her friends and coworkers for a while. When she was going to adopt a kid (daughter Zo, with TV executive Amy Shomer), she decided to finally go public because tabloid stories about her had been circulating for years, according to what she told The Advocate.
When she was presented with the 2021 Trailblazer Award from Out on Film at the Atlanta Film Festival, she said, “I felt like this was such a precious and meaningful event in my life that I wanted to tell my story my way. “I was so happy to become a mother that it was the best thing I could have done. I had moral character in how I lived. I never felt ashamed of being homosexual, so I just wanted to convey my experience how I wanted to.”
Bearse kept up his support for the LGBTQ+ community after coming out. She worked as a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign starting in the late 1990s. In addition, she has endorsed queer visibility in Hollywood and National Coming Out Day, both initiatives of the Human Rights Campaign. She remarked to the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1994, “It’s tougher to discriminate against a face than an idea.” She has also worked as an ambassador for the Gay Games.
When her then-partner, TV producer Dell Pearce, got into a custody battle with an ex-partner with whom Pierce had adopted a kid in 1997, Bearse’s personal life raised attention to the obstacles gay parents confront.
In order to raise her kid, Bearse relocated from Los Angeles to Atlanta in 2000. Before the couple’s breakup, she co-owned a coffee business with Pearce. She recently told GLAAD that leaving Hollywood’s demands behind was her family’s “greatest decision ever.”
Bearse married Seattle-based businesswoman Carrie Schenkman in 2010. The couple divided their time between Atlanta, where Bearse resided with Zo, and the Pacific Northwest, where Schenkman was raising her own daughter.
At about the same time, Bearse started acting again, making appearances in episodes of the TV shows Anger Management and Drop Dead Diva, the mock horror movie Sky Sharks, and the second season of the Prime Video series Smothered. She will next be seen with Billy Eichner in Nicholas Stoller’s romantic comedy Bros, in which two commitment-phobic males attempt to maintain a relationship (Forgetting Sarah Marshall). According to The Hollywood Reporter, the studio has hailed the movie as “the first homosexual romantic comedy from a major studio.”
In 2021, Bearse told The Advocate, “I thought, I’ll just give this a go and see what happens, and as long as it is enjoyable and exciting, I’ll stick with it.” “Simply put, I’m enjoying acting once more. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it because it’s truly been so long.”
The majority of Bearse’s Married… with Children co-stars get along well with her. She stated in an interview with the Fayetteville Observer that she is still friendly with both Applegate and David Garrison, who portrayed Marcy’s first husband. She isn’t friendly with Ed O’Neill, the star of the series, though, and it seems like she never truly was.
At a fan event in Raleigh, North Carolina in 2018, Bearse spoke about their relationship and said that while she preferred not to discuss dirty laundry, there was “no love lost” between them.
O’Neill was more direct in a 2013 interview with the Archive of American Television, identifying Bearse as the one cast member with whom he had trouble getting along. He added that the only other cast members who were not invited to her wedding were David Faustino (Bud). O’Neill claims that after he took offense and confronted her, she admitted that she believed he and Faustino would have found it amusing to see Bearse and her wife dressed in tuxedos. This shows that Bearse’s intuitions were generally accurate.
After all these years, 63-year-old Bearse isn’t a big admirer of the show itself. In 2018, she reportedly told News Corp Australia that the program was “mean-spirited and misogynistic.” “Simply put, it was wholly improper. The show wouldn’t be created now, in my opinion, because it is so widely objectionable.” She does acknowledge that Marcy is a character that is “close and dear” to her. She continued, “I have a lot of love for her and I truly appreciate a lot of the writing that went her way. Her voice was distinctive from everyone else’s on the show.