Patrick Duffy Reveals How Iconic ‘Dallas’ Shower Scene Secretly Came Together

Michelle Stein November 11, 2026, 10:11 am

DALLAS, Patrick Duffy in shower scene as Bobby Ewing — Everett Collection

What To Know

Patrick Duffy’s wife correctly predicted that Dallas would explain Bobby Ewing’s return by revealing the previous season was a dream.
Producers filmed decoy scenes and disguised the iconic shower shoot as an Irish Spring commercial to keep Bobby’s return secret.
The footage was inserted into the Season 9 finale just before broadcast, surprising even co-star Victoria Principal.

Patrick Duffy revealed how his iconic Dallas shower scene secretly came together to bring his character, Bobby Ewing, back from the dead.

In an interview for the Still Here Hollywood Podcast published on November 9, Duffy detailed the lengths he and the production crew went to keep his controversial return from the grave a complete surprise to viewers. The pivotal moment came in the Season 9 finale titled “The Swan,” which aired in May 1986.

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Host Steve Kmetko asked if he had second thoughts about the shower scene before he did it, prompting Duffy to stand firm in his decision 40 years later. “No,” he insisted, explaining that his wife immediately clocked the plot line when he told her about returning to Dallas.

“My wife was standing there. She was incredibly smart, intelligent, well-read, ballerina actress,” Duffy said. “And she instinctively just said, ‘You can’t come back on that show unless that whole last season was a dream.'”

Of course, she was 100% correct.

“[Showerunner] Leonard [Katzman] then called me. I went in, and we had a sit-down talk,” Duffy recalled. “And he said, ‘Here’s my plan: It’s gonna be a dream. And you’re gonna come back. But we can’t just do that because the world will get out.”

He continued, “So we’re gonna film a couple of red herrings. You know, taking the bandages off, and you’ll look in the mirror and go, ‘I look just like him.’ Those kind of things. We did three of those, I think, using the Dallas crew.”

Additionally, the shower scene itself was filmed at a commercial sound stage under the guise of Duffy doing an ad for Irish Spring soap. This meant that Katzman, the cameramen, the unit production manager, and Duffy were the only ones who knew about the plot twist of Bobby’s death.

“It was like a James Bond film,” Duffy pointed out. “They hand-carried that clip to New York and spliced it into the feed just before the show went on the air. So that even technicians, nobody, it didn’t get out.”

Not even Victoria Principal, who played Pamela Barnes Ewing, knew about the plot twist ahead of the episode airing. That’s because she filmed the shower scene with her new fiancé, Mark Graison (John Beck), after Bobby’s “death.”

Season 9 ended with Pam opening the shower door, to which Bobby simply said, “Good morning,” and then the episode ended.

In Season 10, viewers learned that Bobby’s death and everything in Season 9 onward never actually happened.

Dallas aired for 14 seasons from 1978 to 1991. In addition to Duffy and Gray, the show starred Larry Hagman, Ken Kercheval, Linda Gray, Barbara Bel Geddes, Steve Kanaly, Howard Keel, Charlene Tilton, Susan Howard, and Deborah Rennard, among others. It also sparked a spinoff, Knots Landing, which ran for 14 seasons from 1979 to 1993.