Debra Messing Teases ‘Big Sweeping Changes’ Coming for ‘Will & Grace’

The second season of NBC’s revival of Will & Grace is still weeks away from premiering, but series star Debra Messing is already teasing the “big sweeping” changes ahead.

When fans last saw Debra Messing as Grace at the end of the debut season of NBC’s Will & Grace reboot, she was facing the reality of upgrading her relationship status with Will from friends to siblings, being bombarded with news of engagements, and facing the fact that some view her relationships as toxic.

Moving into the series’ second season, Messing claims that there are more “big sweeping changes” to come.

“You can expect big changes for all four characters,” Messing said during an appearance on The Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s podcast, The HFPA in Conversation, where she gave fans a fist glimpse at season 2. “Grace is getting a love interest, which I’m looking very forward to…Karen is getting divorced, Will is changing jobs, and Jack is getting married…big sweeping changes so that means there’s going to be all kinds of new things to play with and joke about.”

Messing also revealed a few of the “extraordinary” guest stars set to make appearances this season.

“Alec Baldwin is coming back…Chelsea Handler is coming and I think she’s the perfect kind of actor to come and play in our playground,” she said.

Although she refrained from detailing in what capacity they will return or how they will affect the story, fans of the long-standing series will remember that as season 1 came to an end, Karen had called off her long-term affair with her lover, portrayed by Baldwin, in a bid to keep her marriage afloat and her relationship “healthy.”

While the series, which has been renewed for 18-episode long second and third seasons, has seen major cliffhangers and twists and impactful moments, like Karen’s departure from Baldwin’s character, creators and showrunners Max Mutchnick and David Kohan have claimed that the storylines are never set in a strict plan, but rather flow organically.

“Things happen during the course of a season that I mean, yeah we might have an idea or we might have in the back of our minds something that we want two years down the road,” Kohan said in April. “But we also know that things happen during the course of a season. Relationships are made or moments sort of coalesce around something that we didn’t foresee, that move the show in a different direction. So to be married to a certain way to go or a certain way to end it — it’s written in pencil.”

Will & Grace is set to return with all new episode this fall.

Photo credit: NBC / Chris Haston