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Where do you start a conversation with Donna Mills?
Her breakout film role in Clint Eastwood’s 1971 thriller Play Misty for Me features one of the few tasteful scenes of female nudity during a Hollywood love scene. She put a thriving career on pause to raise an adopted daughter at the age of 54. She remains one of Hollywood’s foremost authorities on eye makeup. (According to Mills, uber-producer Ryan Murphy instructed the makeup artists on Doctor Odyssey to watch her famed tutorials prior to her guest appearance.)
“I’ve seen very little of the backstabbing everybody talks about,” she tells me of her decades-long Hollywood career. “I’ve seen people who work together and care about each other and care about what they’re making.”
There’s also her vineyard, which sits on the woodsy hillside a short stroll from the patio where she’s put out a cheese plate for us. Once a year, she and her significant other, Larry Gilman, harvest it alongside a group of adventurous neighbors. No topic is off limits, she’s assured me, though the reason for my visit today is clear to both of us.
Knots Landing, the 1980s primetime soap on which Mills rose to icon status playing scheming, husband-stealing Abby Cunningham, is currently enjoying a resurgence of nostalgia-fueled popularity after entering the streaming world for the first time. (The style influences of the decade that gave birth to it also saw their way into recent runway collections by designers like Stella McCartney and LaQuan Smith.)
Mills, 84, is meeting the moment with a work ethic that hasn’t slowed. She’s launched a weekly podcast, We’re Knot Done Yet, with fellow costars Michele Lee and Joan Van Ark. Back in January, she attended a two-day autographing event with only the clothes on her back as the LA firestorms came within a hair’s breadth of destroying her expansive French country home. “I stayed with a friend, but I didn’t have time to shop, so people had to put up with me in jeans, a plaid shirt, and red sneakers,” she tells me. It never occurred to her not to attend.
On social media, I have been one of the biggest cheerleaders of the show’s high-caliber performances and bonkers plot twists, much to the amusement of my podcasting co-host and producing partner, New York Times–bestselling novelist Eric Shaw Quinn, who would prefer I spend our episodes quoting Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington, not pitching Knots reboots. (Knots is what the show’s stars call it, by the way.) But Knots is currently offering ’80s nostalgia blasts to those for whom a Dallas or Dynasty rewatch might raise the specter of our current oligarchy. The faces of the show—then and now—are Mills, Lee, and Van Ark, whose characters offer three different versions of an empowered woman making hay out of the middle-class constraints of the era. Of course, Mills plays the villain of the three, but her character’s ruthless desire to succeed in business at a time when most women were working as secretaries makes her feel more grounded and less sadistic than her rival primetime villains. She didn’t want her opponents to suffer; she just wanted them out of her way.
“She wasn’t a victim,” she says of her character today. “I was tired of playing victims. They’re boring.”
Gracious diplomacy seems to be Mills’s signature style, but she speaks of Abby Cunningham with a startling reverence. “I liked her,” she says of the woman who stole her friend and neighbor’s husband and then stole his fortune and made a real estate empire out of it. “She was a real person. She was a mother. She was vulnerable—just never in front of other people.”
The show’s fashions travel from the confused domesticity of the waning days of the Carter era, where flowing nods to ’70s music culture brush up against drab floral prints, to the glittering, primary-color-filled excess of the go-go ’80s. Mills makes her entrance in season two, clad in sheer blouses and halter tops and the frequent bikini, right around the time costar Michele Lee sheds her Princess Anne bouffant, a hairstyle that would seem unwieldy on a performer without Lee’s dancer background.
The show ran for an astonishing 14 seasons, with Mills a mainstay for nine of them. As her motives became sharper and more relentless, so did her clothes. While it can feel like the ridicule of shoulder-pad-stuffed suits started promptly on the morning of January 1, 1990, in the Me Too era of today they read almost like a protective armor for women as they attempted to enter male-dominated corporate spaces on equal footing for the first time. Still, Mills orchestrated her fashion makeover—from scantily dressed homewrecker to ruthless corporate titan—without the firm hand of a costume designer.
“Once a week, the show would send me to Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills and I’d pick out outfits for Abby. A personal shopper would meet us, and they’d lay out coffee and croissants—it was quite lovely, actually.” I’ll say. A generous network-funded budget, creative freedom, a personal shopper—the stuff of most actors’ dreams (and mine).
When she took on the role, though, Mills was prepared not to be anyone’s friend on set. On her first day of work, the show’s creator, David Jacobs, warned her, “Don’t expect anyone to have lunch with you.” Her character was being brought in to stir the pot on a quiet Dallas spin-off that had originally been pitched as a network take on Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage. And she’d be getting juicer storylines than her fellow cast members.
The warning was for naught. However, in a recent episode of We re Knot Done Yet, Donna Mills and costar Michele Lee did address a bumpy moment early in their working history, when Mills walked off set because she felt Lee was bullying her as they filmed a scene together. They mended fences in a phone call that evening—but in a disarming exchange about the incident today, Lee says that the reason for her behavior was Mills’s stunning beauty, which made her feel like the unpopular girl in high school all over again.
The reason for her departure after nine seasons? When the show lost many of its gay writers, Abby’s storylines started getting soft, she says. (As for female writers, Mills can recall maybe one or two during her entire run.) To compensate, Jacobs would call in his lead actresses for a read-through with the writers on every new script, essentially giving them a creative say in the fates of their characters each week.
Despite being one of the longest running and most popular primetime dramas in history, Knots’s distribution to new media was held up for years. The problem, apparently, was its fourth season, in which fan-favorite character Ciji, played by a heavily mulleted Lisa Hartman, delivers a series of stirring vocal performances, and securing the rights and clearances for the songs she sang presented a tangle for parent studio Warner Brothers. Until recently, you could only find the first 13 episodes—none of which included Mills—on DVD.
Then came its Amazon Prime debut, and with it, a flood of viewers like me. Whether audiences were now discovering Knots for the first time or engaging in a nostalgic binge, its over-the-top moments and one-liners have become the perfect fodder for the irreverent social media spaces in which so many of us now discuss our favorite shows.
My Instagram reel of Gary Ewing’s drunken meltdown inside a recording studio—with Ewing played by a fearless and fully committed Ted Shackelford as Mills looks on with icy contempt—racked up over 20,000 views within a few hours of being posted, and the fierce battles of words between Mills and her female costars have become campy clickbait, replete with delightfully dated one-liners. (“The next time you want to show me your gratitude, go save a whale in my name,” Mills hisses at Lee from her hospital bed after being strong-armed into donating a kidney to save her on-screen niece’s life.)
In a larger sense, Knots Landing is being embraced as a brazen throwback to a time when soap opera excess was played in primetime with absolute earnestness by immensely talented actors. It also hails from a lost period in television history when American suburbia could be more than just a backdrop to stories about attractive teens or the winking, self-parody of shows like Desperate Housewives. More recently, the age of peak TV has made suburbia intensely specific, its regions and demographics clearly outlined, a character in the plot — the bougie Big Sur of Big Little Lies, the deceptively plain Hawkins, Indiana, of Stranger Things. Knots Landing had California’s beaches and sun, but at heart, it was meant to be everywhere. And its famed cul-de-sac, Seaview Circle, told TV viewers—60 million of them at the show’s peak—that right around the corner from where they lived there might be a seething cauldron of kidnapping plots and adulterous affairs changing the fates of inherited fortunes.
After leaving Knots and devoting years to full-time motherhood, 2014 saw Donna take on a lengthy guest role on General Hospital, where she was stunned by how much the pace of daytime production had accelerated. (After first training as a dancer, Mills had started her career in soap operas when they were still broadcast in black and white—and when the actors were given time to rehearse and block their scenes.) “Sometimes we were shooting three episodes a day,” she says now. “I never left the studio feeling like I’d nailed it.” But she wasn’t so stunned that she couldn’t keep pace with her younger cast members. She stayed for a year, won an Emmy, and returned for more episodes several years later.
Throughout our lengthy conversation, there are moments where she speaks of herself less like someone who’s been a household name for most of my adult life and more like an elegant out-of-towner who’s just been flattered by special treatment from an industry friend during a studio tour. She describes the lengths to which director Jordan Peele went after a positive COVID test prevented Mills and her daughter from attending the Los Angeles premiere of his horror thriller, Nope, in which she has a haunting cameo. (Peele arranged for them to take part in the equally lavish London premiere instead.) “It was just so nice to be thought of,” Mills says, lowering her still disarmingly beautiful blue eyes.
On a recent episode of her podcast, the girls, as she and her cohosts refer to themselves, discussed the persistent sense that despite Knots’ newly invigorated fanbase, it’s always been slighted, especially when viewed against its soapy rivals. She credits creator and executive producer David Jacobs with fostering a familial atmosphere that aided the show’s longevity—but despite also creating its parent show, the megahit Dallas, Jacobs, who passed away in 2023, is rarely celebrated today. The show boasted a cast of theater-trained heavyweights during most of its 14-season run, but earned a scant two Emmy nominations for performances, neither of them for Mills.
When I propose that sexism might have been the cause for the show’s frequent dismissals, Mills seems caught off guard. (According to the show’s stars, the last warning from the director before cameras started rolling on set wasn’t “Action!” but “Mirrors down!”—a statement on the centrality of its lead actresses and their storylines.) After a thoughtful beat, Mills remembers how a male costar often commented that the male characters on Knots existed primarily to motivate the women. She also mentions the failed pilot she did before joining Knots, in which she played a female detective and found herself being lectured by the head of the network on the fallacy of creating an entire show around a woman.
Today, what was once viewed as the show’s weakness may become its superpower. We’re in a period of women pushing back en masse against blanket dismissals of the media that centers them; even the vaunted New York Times Book Review now has a regular critic of romance fiction. Could the dominance of its female characters end up positioning Knots for a new audience? Perhaps—but for now, new media is being given the credit.
All of this has, of course, produced the inevitable talk of a reboot. Mills isn’t convinced it’s in the cards, but if it happens, she’s got an idea. “I think Abby is homeless, and we’ll see her working her way back,” she says. “I would love to play that.”
Because, like the iconic actress who played her, Abby never stops.