Patricia Heaton just shared a hilarious story about how some Christian hymns can sound from the outside looking in.
“I remember on the set of THE MIDDLE, Neil Flynn, who played my husband, was Irish-Catholic from Chicago and close to my age, so we had the same lot of references and he was brought up going to Mass and all that stuff,” the actress said while speaking to the Babylon Bee.
Heaton shared that the pair were “laughing about the hymns that we would sing” in church.
“Eden Sher, who played our daughter Sue, who’s Jewish, is sitting there and I’m like, ‘Listen to this song we used to sing, Eden,’ and I don’t — I think Neil was singing with me,” she continued. “It was called ‘Sons of God,’ and it goes ‘Sons of God, hear His holy word, gather round the table of the Lord, eat His body, drink His blood, and we’ll sing a song of love, hallelujah’…so I’m singing, happy, and Eden, she’s going ‘What?’”
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Heaton’s time on THE MIDDLE made her a bona fide sitcom legend, following her time on the hit show EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND. But did you know the actress was initially hesitant to take the role?
“When I got the script for THE MIDDLE, I thought to myself, ‘Gee, do I really want to play another mom on a sitcom?’” she told HuffPost in a 2013 interview. “Yet as I looked at it, I realized Frankie is the Ray Barone of the series. I was the long-suffering wife Debra to Ray’s bumbling, fumbling well-intentioned but always-messing-up husband. And now Neil is the long-suffering husband to Frankie Heck, who is bumbling and fumbling and well-intentioned and always messing up. So, now I get to play the other side of it. It’s more like playing Lucille Ball. It’s more like I LOVE LUCY, where it’s the wife at the center. I hadn’t seen that for a while.”
In a 2018 interview with Decider, Heaton explained why these family-oriented sitcoms resonate with so many people around the country.
“I think it’s the same thing as RAYMOND; we show an American family,” she said. “The Barones were Italian [with] the in-laws always interfering, and then [in THE MIDDLE] we have this nice Midwestern family with a very Midwestern kind of vibe about everything.”
Heaton continued, “I think those people have been overlooked occasionally…I think Hollywood has realized there’s an enormous amount of people living between New York and LA [who are] underrepresented.”
“Also, the quality of the writing was superb,” she added. “It’s always, always, always about the writing.”
Whether she’s making audiences laugh onscreen or cracking co-stars up on set, Heaton is truly the queen of family comedies.
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