‘Sister, Sister’: Marques Houston Says Tia and Tamera Stopped Speaking to Him on Set

Sister, Sister probably wouldn’t have been the successful show it became without Tia and Tamera’s annoying next-door neighbor, Roger Evans. For five seasons, Marques Houston starred as the crazy-in-love neighbor of the twin sisters who did anything for their attention. The actors remained close behind the scenes, but Houston began having doubts about staying on the show, and early on. He revealed in his UNCENSORED special that he wanted to quit the show after Season 2 to focus on his singing career and fear that he’d be pigeonholed into the image of his character. He eventually opted to stay, but word got back to the twins and it caused some friction.

“The producers asked, ‘What can we do to get Marques to come back?’ Tia and I were closer than Tamera and I were. At a certain point, we talked about it briefly. But, it was kind of like an unsaid thing,” he explained. “They were very upset with me, that I wasn’t going to come back because they didn’t understand as well. So the third season, when we did come back, they kind of like, didn’t talk to me for the first couple of episodes. Because they were hurt. And I understand. They were hurt because they didn’t understand why. And they didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes.”

Luckily, he came up with a clever idea to make things right. “So for me, we made up, and there was this thing, we kind of made this gum wall, it was behind a set where people would stick gum and write messages. So I wrote them a message one day and I said, ‘I’m really sorry guys, and I really love you.’ And after that, everything was perfect,” he recalled.

As it turns out, Tia may have been more hurt due to her and Houston’s romantic interest in one another. She recently admitted he was her first kiss.

“My wildest experience, because I grew up on that show, and of course, I’m a teenager…My first real kiss was in the parking lot of Paramount Studios with Marques Houston,” she said on The Terrell Show. 

Houston corroborated the story in his UNCENSORED special and revealed her mother warned her to stay away from the twins in that way as they entered their older teenage years and were able to date.