Brenda Strong remembers the exact moment she realized Desperate Housewives was a hit.
“I was standing in my local Starbucks on my way to work one day, and someone near me who wasn’t really paying attention heard me order my tea,” Strong tells PEOPLE. “They immediately turned and said, ‘Mary Alice.’ It was like he recognized my voice before he saw me.”
After that experience, Strong, 64, had another realization.
“I realized I had to start to be careful,” Strong says. “When you’re talking to a telemarketer or someone on the phone, or you’re paying a bill, if you’re not really nice to them if they recognize your voice, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”
She adds, “I realized I have to be really careful now [because] people will recognize — just from my voice — that it’s me.”
On Desperate Housewives, Strong played Mary Alice Young — one of the housewives of Wisteria Lane. In the October 2004 pilot episode, Young takes her own life. Following her death, Young’s friends Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria), Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman), Bree Weston (Marcia Cross) and Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher) set off to discover the secrets and events leading up to her suicide. Strong served as the show’s narrator for the remainder of the series, frequently appearing in flashbacks.
“When we launched, the response was pretty overwhelmingly positive,” Strong says. “I think we all kind of knew we had something at the time.”
Although Strong’s voice eventually became synonymous with Young, she almost didn’t land the role. When the studio shot the initial pilot, Strong was filming another show so a different actress was cast in the role. The other show did not go past one season, so an opportunity opened up for the budding actress.
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“By the time they had done the pilot and the network had a chance to look at it, they decided that they wanted someone to play Mary Alice, who really had a particular quality in her voice,” Strong explains. “So I was very fortunate to be available to audition finally for it.”
At the time, Strong was performing Shakespeare in Montana but conveniently flew into Los Angeles to work on a movie. She made the most of her trip and met with Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry for an audition.
“When I walked in, he said, ‘Don’t worry, don’t be nervous. We’re not even going to look at you. We’re all going to close our eyes. And just tell us a story,’ ” Strong retells. “And so I did, and he opened his eyes and he said, ‘Can you get out of this commitment in Montana?’ And I said, ‘I asked for an understudy.’ So I thought that was a good sign.”
However, the voice of Young did not come naturally. “It’s definitely not my normal speaking voice. I don’t speak in this cadence,” she says.
“Marc writes very musically, there’s pitch and there’s rhythm to the way he writes the — what we call MAVO — the Mary Alice voiceover. So there’s something inherently already scripted in it.”
Strong recalls one piece of advice she received from producer Michael Edelstein, which helped formulate the distinct voice.
“He said, ‘Why don’t you try dropping your voice down into your heart?’ ” Strong remembers. “As soon as I did that, what came out was not me commenting or kibitzing about my neighbors, it was me having an empathetic kind of point of view on the humanity of each of them and speaking to what’s underneath each of their hearts and what they were struggling with.”
According to Strong, it is the characters’ relatability that keeps the show’s legacy alive.
“Women are very, very much identifying with these archetypes,” she says. “And I think it’s because Marc took such care to create these really distinct characters. And Mary Alice is kind of the soul that allows the truth to come through, the kind of universal truth about how all of us struggle.”
Desperate Housewives is now streaming in its entirety on Hulu.
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