Life With Derek’s Michael Seater has always been well aware of fan chatter about the dynamic he shared with his onscreen stepsister.
During a recent appearance on the “Back to the Best” podcast, Seater, 39, confessed that he and costar, Ashley Leggat, 40, purposely leaned in to their “undeniable chemistry” despite playing family members.
“Here’s the thing, we had an undeniable chemistry that fans loved,” Seater noted.
Life With Derek was a Canadian TV show broadcast via Disney Channel in the United States from 2005 to 2009. Leggat starred as Casey McDonald while Seater played the role of Derek Venturi. In the show, Casey’s mom married Derek’s dad, making them stepsiblings. However, viewers were convinced there was an underlying sexual tension between the two.
“Listen, romance has never been bigger, right?” Seater said, before joking that fans seemingly would have loved Derek and Casey to follow some sort of enemies-to-lovers trope.
“So fans want that and they’re like, well they’re stepsiblings so technically…” he quipped.
Seater said he and Leggat knew how fans perceived their dynamic at the time that the show was being made.
“In these early days of the internet, our producers don’t know that there’s like forums online where people are talking, but we do,” Seater recalled. “We saw that the fans were talking about it. And so, and I can say this because I’ve said it a million times, we knew that the fans liked it, so we leaned into it without letting the writers or the producers know that we were leaning into it.”
Seater recounted how there were times on set during production that the show’s crew had to make changes so the characters didn’t appear to be getting too close for comfort.
“One of those showrunners would be like, ‘No, we can’t use that… Don’t use those shots. Like, it’s too much,’” Seater laughed. “And we’d be, like, sitting on a couch and they’d be like, ‘Can you maybe separate yourselves a little on the couch?’”
Jokes aside, Seater praised Leggat as a colleague, describing her as his “favorite scene partner.”
“I could always do anything, you felt so safe. In comedy you want to be able to try stuff and play around and it’s not always going to land,” he explained.
Seater continued, “We just always had each other’s back and we were always just going for it.”
The actor added that he felt like his and Legget’s rapport with one another was a crucial aspect in the show’s success.
“That’s the show and you know that is the engine of the show. It had to be that these two people had this amazing chemistry and could bounce off each other,” Seater said.
