'Will & Grace' stars Sean Hayes and Eric McCormack say there was almost a 5th main character, but he got cut while filming the pilot

• "Will & Grace" stars Sean Hayes and Eric McCormack said there was almost a fifth main character.
• On their new podcast, "Just Jack & Will," the stars said Cress Williams was cast in the pilot.

"Will & Grace" stars Sean Hayes and Eric McCormack have revealed that the iconic sitcom could have looked vastly different as there was almost a fifth main character.

The character was to be played by "Black Lightning" star Cress Williams and was going to be a fellow lawyer who worked with McCormack's character, Will Truman.

On the first episode of their new podcast, "Just Jack & Will," which premiered Thursday, the actors spoke about why the character was cut from the show while filming the pilot.

"There were five characters as regulars, and the fifth was my partner in my small law firm," McCormack said. "Straight guy. I think written probably as Jewish, yet in the end, it was Cress Williams."

According to the stars, the character was meant to be the "opposite" of Hayes' character, Jack McFarland, and another important friendship in Will's life.

McCormack said that while they were making the pilot, famed television director James Burrows thought there were too many characters on screen and asked creators Max Mutchnick and David Kohan to cut a character.

"Two days in, and I wasn't aware of this... Jimmy just went to the boys and said, 'It's just too many. It's one finger too many. These four are the show,'" McCormack recalled.

"And I felt so terrible. It was nothing he did or didn't do. It was just kind of like my character on 'The Jennifer McCarthy Show' the year before. It just didn't fit what the show was supposed to be."

For his part, Hayes said that he forgot about Williams' casting because he was so young and was ultra-focused on his own role at the time. Hayes added that he spent the first year of the show worrying that he would be fired.

Hayes and McCormack starred in 11 seasons of "Will & Grace" alongside Debra Messing (Grace Adler) and Megan Mullally (Karen Walker).

"Just Jack & Will" is available to stream now.