The showrunner of everyone’s favorite effed-up family dramedy has just one shameless request: Get Emmy Rossum back for the shows’ finale.
Showtime’s Shameless announced earlier this month that it is officially ending its run with its forthcoming 11th season, following in the footsteps of the original U.K. series upon which it is based. While the Gallagher family is readying for a final goodbye, one person already bid farewell to the Chicago projects: Rossum’s Fiona, who exited the series in the season 9 finale after essentially raising her many siblings with little help from William H. Macy’s drunken patriarch, Frank.
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Creator John Wells said he’s hoping to get Rossum back for the show’s final episode, though it may be easier said than done.
“I’ll certainly ask her [to return],” Wells told Entertainment Weekly. “She’s very busy and she does a lot of other things. We all love each other and we’ve been through wonderful things together, so I’ll ask her and hopefully, she’ll be available at the time that we do it. But we’re so far from knowing what that would be and when that would be, and she’s just started on her new project for the Peacock, Angelyne, so I’m going to leave her to that for quite some time…until I start bugging her.”
Rossum, who also directed two episodes of the series, fought to be paid equally to co-star Macy in 2016, arguing that her role had increased significantly over the years and that she received more screen time than Macy. The actress refused to shoot the eighth season of Shameless if her demands were not met, and Showtime reportedly would not consider continuing the series without its Fiona.
Though Rossum won her battle for pay parity, she chose to leave Shameless at the end of season 9 to pursue other opportunities. Since exiting the Showtime series, Rossum directed an episode of Amazon’s Modern Love and appeared in the Liam Neeson film Cold Pursuit. She will next star in and produce previously mentioned series Angelyne, about Los Angeles’ mysterious billboard icon, which she is working on with her Mr. Robot creator husband, Sam Esmail.
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She may be “busy,” but Rossum teased in November of 2019 that she’s still open to joining the Gallagher clan at some point in the future.
“I would never close my door on the family,” Rossum told Entertainment Weekly in March. “Like I said in what I wrote and what I said to them repeatedly, they should just think of me being down the block. I’m just in New York. It’s not like I’ll never be in L.A. or Chicago [where they film the series] ever again, so I’m not that far away.”
Family is forever, but whether Rossum will have the time to sneak away for a reunion remains to be seen.