‘Shameless’ Cast Member Samantha Hanratty Confirms Carl’s Wife Kassidi Met a Brutal Fate
Samantha Hanratty was only a Shameless cast member for half a season as Kassidi. At the end of season 8, she married Carl Gallagher (Ethan Cutkosky). The season 9 premiere was her last appearance and her fate has remained a mystery to fans. Fortunately, Hanratty herself knows definitively what happened to Carl’s wife, Kassidy.
Hanratty spoke with Showbiz Cheat Sheet by phone on Nov. 18 about her new Showtime series, Yellowjackets. On the new show, Hanratty plays young Misty, the character Christina Ricci plays as an adult. Looking back on her other Showtime drama, Hanratty revealed the sad fate of Kassidi.
‘Shameless’ cast member Samantha Hanratty filmed Kassidi’s death
In the season 9 premiere, Carl’s military school friends tell him they’ve taken care of his problem and nobody will ever find the body. That suggests something permanent, but since Shameless fans never saw a body, they wondered what really happened to Kassidi. If they had included her death scene, nobody would still be asking.
“Yeah, we filmed it actually,” Hanratty confirmed. “We actually filmed kind of like a little death scene for her but they never aired it. So I kind of thought when they didn’t air it that maybe she would come back or be alive, but originally we filmed a scene where the boy in the military, with Carl, grabs me and buries a hole and then buries me alive in it. That was a whole scene that we filmed.”
Shameless fans weren’t too fond of Kassidi. Hanratty told Cosmopolitan in 2018 that she had “mixed emotions” due to the fan reaction, but she understood that people were protective of Carl. Still, buried alive sure sounds like a brutal way to go. That seems like more of a Ray Donovan death scene than a Shameless death scene.
“From my understanding, from what we filmed, that’s how it felt,” Hanratty agreed.
Samantha Hanratty was hoping to rejoin the ‘Shameless’ cast
Since Shameless cut her death scene out of the episode, Hanratty was hoping that meant there was still a chance Kassidi could return. Hanratty waited patiently through seasons 9, 10 and 11 but they never called her to rejoin the Shameless cast. She would have even returned just to play Kassidi’s corpse if they’d ever dug her up.
“I’m also just surprised that it never came back to bite anybody in the butt,” Hanratty said. “I was waiting for them to call me to be like, ‘Okay, we need you to be your dead body.’ I’m glad though. I think Carl deserves to have a happy ending.”
You can see Carl’s wife’s death scene if you know where to look
Hanratty said her death scene has surfaced online. Currently, the only clip of it is a YouTube video recorded off the screen of another YouTube video. It’s very short and sudden. In what appears to be night vision, Kassidi is sitting in a chair when a man approaches her and calls her, “Mrs. Gallagher.” She screams, “What the f***? What the f***?’ and it quickly cuts to her unconscious body with her head covered in a hood. They roll her hooded body into the hole and start filling it.
“I think it’s on YouTube somewhere on their deleted scenes,” Hanratty said. “That was the end unfortunately. It was a pretty sad way to go. I was very bummed because I was a huge fan of the show, but I’m glad she got some sort of ending.”
