Why One Melrose Place Star Skipped Out on a Cast Reunion — and Still Regrets It

Thomas Calabro admits he regrets not joining his Melrose Place castmates for a 2012 reunion photo shoot.

While the 65-year-old actor was the only original cast member to play his character, Dr. Michael Mancini, for the entirety of the hit primetime soap’s seven-season run in the ’90s, he skipped the cast reunion for the cover of Entertainment Weekly’s October 2012 reunion issue.

On the most recent episode of their rewatch podcast Still the Place, fellow Melrose alumni Laura Leighton, Courtney Thorne Smith and Daphne Zuniga took Calabro to task for his absence at the photo shoot.

“We missed having you,” Leighton said while questioning why Calabro was a no-show.

“Okay. I'll tell you why I didn't do it,” Calabro replied. “Because I didn't think about seeing all you guys together and having that kind of fun. That would have made it attractive to me.”

“I should've gone. What am I doing?” Calabro recalled telling his wife after his former castmates called him while they were all having dinner together at the time.

“But I'm not into looking back that much, you know what I mean? I'm kinda done,” he continued, adding that he turns down “pretty much all” interviews about the show. “I’m not interested,” he said.

Despite that, however, Calabro did reprise his Melrose Place role in The CW’s 2009 reboot -

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of the series. And for its 20th anniversary in 2012, he shared memories of being on the show, telling PEOPLE, “Going to work was always a pleasure. It was such a great community and cast and crew. Everybody was having a ball."

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Smith said that she initially shared Calabro’s disinterest in revisiting the past, but her perspective has since shifted. “It's fun to talk about that time in our lives,” she said. “We were all together doing this thing in this time in our lives. So, that's what's been really fun, remembering that time, the nineties, and what we were doing in that crazy time.”

“We were so close. I think that's really rare,” she added.

“It is, and that's why I say, I miss seeing you guys,” Calabro said. “But doing a photo shoot … I'm not interested.”

Smith encouraged Calabro to think about the opportunity for the cast to get together again should another reunion photo shoot ever come up. (Or perhaps for that upcoming reboot.)

“I’ll come to New York and have dinner with you guys,” he said, though added, “I probably won't do the shoot.”

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