Season five of CBS’s hit series The Good Wife premieres on Sunday, September 29, 2013, and series creator/executive producer Robert King offered journalists gathered for the 2013 summer Television Critics Association event in Los Angeles a sneak peek at what fans of the show can expect. “We are going on our fifth year, and our tenth episode this year will be our hundredth episode overall. And at times, it feels like we are basically the old kid on the block, looking at all of these new, relevant shows coming up. And then Anthony Weiner sends a text, and Eliot Spitzer’s madam runs against him for comptroller, and then the old vigor comes back to tell new stories, and we realize there’s so many stories to tell.”
King continued: “The stories this season are very explosive. It’s more about our team, not as much about all of the guest stars coming in. We really want to see how they all face each other. It’s basically a year about civil war. But, we do have a lot of great guest stars this year. Carrie Preston is coming back, who we love. Gary Cole is coming back for an arc, and America Ferrera, who you may not have seen since the second year. Melissa George is a new person who is coming in to work in Peter’s office; Juliet Rylance; Ben Rappaport, who is one of these rebel attorneys who are going to break off with Julianna – I mean with Alicia and Cary; and Jeffrey Tambor is coming in as a judge.”
Also on hand to discuss the show was series star Julianna Margulies who talked about her character’s growth over the years and how much she enjoys playing Alicia.
Julianna Margulies The Good Wife Interview
What do you think about the growth of Alicia over the last few years?
Julianna Margulies: “I sort of equate it to when you first meet Alicia, she’s kind of at the bottom of her emotional life and the bottom of her professional life. She’s living in a little bubble that she allowed to happen, and so it’s been such a great journey to climb out of it and discover who she is as a woman, discover who she is as a lawyer, realize that she is many more things than she allowed herself to be. So it’s a constant journey. I think she’s constantly discovering things about herself, which is a happy circumstance and, also, an incredibly frightening one for her.”
Is it fun to actually get to play that?
Julianna Margulies: “I love it. I have so much fun because I’m constantly able to grow with the character. I mean, that’s the privilege of doing television is that you get these characters and you live with them and you find out all these things about them. One of the things we’re trying to do with bringing Stockard Channing in as her mom is sort of get a glimpse into this past and who she was then, and you can kind of understand why she wouldn’t just get up and leave her husband. That’s what her mother did. I’m slowly being able to open up little tiny cracks into her past to understand why she is and who she is.”
Do you think Michael J. Fox will be returning?
Julianna Margulies: “We’re hoping. If NBC lets him and if his show ends…I think with a half-hour, they finish in March.”
He said he’s allowed to come back.
Julianna Margulies: “Oh, really? For one?”
And he said he would love to.
Julianna Margulies: “I hope so. The two of us talk about it all the time. There’s this really strange relationship between his character and Alicia in that she’s disgusted, repelled by him, and completely attracted to who he is as a person at the same time. It is the most complex, I think, relationship on TV. [Laughing] So we love playing it and I would love to have him back.”
What do you like about being able to do a show this good but have a life outside of Hollywood and kind of keeping your family on the East Coast rather than the middle of LA?
Julianna Margulies: “Well, it’s something I fought for hard. They wanted to do this show either in Vancouver or here. I’m a New Yorker and I want to bring my kid up there. My parents are there, and I want to be there for them and I want them to know their grandson, and my husband works there. It was sort of a no-brainer for me which was I love this character and this show so much, but I know doing an hour drama and 22 episodes a year means that I won’t see my family much. So if I have to live in a different place and not feel at home, then it won’t work.”
Could you have imagined how far the show would come?
Julianna Margulies: “No. You know, it’s funny. We were just talking about that in the green room is that Robert [King] wrote this show thinking it was only going to go 13 episodes, and he had all 13 planned out. But then he got the pickup and he was like, ‘Oops.’ So, no. I think we all were really surprised and it really is a luxury to get to see where she’s going to go, and I think we all feed each other. Actors feed the writers, too. If they see an actor passionate about their character, it makes them passionate to write for you. So I feel like it’s a great two-way street that we discovered.”
Do you ever offer suggestions of where you want her to go?
Julianna Margulies: “I’m still figuring that out, where I want her to go. I don’t know.”
How does Alicia feel about becoming the governor’s wife and how will having that extra power change her character this season?
Julianna Margulies: “I mean, I think you started seeing a little bit of it last year seeping in, and what I love about it is I think it really challenges her moral compass as someone who always wants to do good. But it is incredibly provocative to be in a powerful situation. I think she knows very clearly that she changed her status in her professional life by being the governor-elect’s wife and then the governor’s wife.
She’s very aware that she’s choosing a slippery slope that might not really be natural to her. And I love playing that because I think that she isn’t quite aware of this eruption that’s about to happen because of the, basically, war that she’s causing at Lockhart/Gardner. And by running away from something, I think, that she’s so emotionally and physically attracted to, she is creating mayhem which will be interesting because I don’t know how well she does in an emotional situation like that. ”
Could you talk about being as reactive as you have to be in this role? So much of this you have to do facially and not verbally. Can you just talk about four seasons’ worth of that?
Julianna Margulies: “I think it’s my own undoing, really, because in the pilot, Robert and Michelle [King] were telling me that they were cutting out lines because they loved just the silence of the facial expressions, that they conveyed more than words. So I try as best I can to convey an entire emotion within a two-second moment without using any words, and it can be tricky. But I think it’s really such a key to who Alicia is in that she internalizes so much, and it’s a great challenge.
I love doing it because I do often think that the difference between television and film as opposed to theater is that if you just make one little look on the stage, the back row isn’t going to see it, but on film one turn of your head or just a blink of an eye is a huge gesture. And so I love trying to emote a feeling without having to speak. Of course, if it wasn’t written, I wouldn’t be able to do it, so it is the writing in that it gives me a rich palette to work from.”
