Actress Melissa Leo, 36, is a pro at handling disappointment; people in her field have to be. But she did feel let down when she wasn’t asked back for a second season of playing her character, Emma, on ABC’s The Young Riders. “At first they told me it was a budget decision,” Leo, now a star of NBC’s Homicide, says. “but when I learned that nearly everyone else in the cast had been called back, I knew it wasn’t about money.”
Leo asked around and eventually learned that her rough-hewn portrayal of her character just hadn’t been sexy enough for the show’s producers. That rang true to her: All season, she says, the director had urged her to let down her long red hair, crank up the makeup, wear more fetching corsets. But Leo didn’t think that Emma, a tough woman living alone in the middle of nowhere, was the type to flaunt her charms. “As soon as I knew the real reason they let me go, I could handle it,” she reflects. “The truth is, I wouldn’t have wanted to stay on the show and play Emma a different way.”