Julianna Margulies, the right woman for ‘The Good Wife’
Who could forget Julianna Margulies as Alicia Florrick in the opening moments of the new CBS hit “The Good Wife”? Standing at a news conference beside her disgraced politician husband, Peter ( Chris Noth), the way she looks pale and vaguely sick to her stomach. That moment when she notices a stray thread clinging to his sleeve and, in spite of herself, reaches out to remove it. And right afterward, when they’re alone in the hallway and Peter asks, “Are you all right?” the way she answers him with the roundhouse slap he deserves, then walks away in her slightly dowdy good suit and pearls. The character never says a word, and yet we know who she is. Presence established. Audience hooked.
The force that Margulies conveyed in that scene, says writer-producer Robert King, explains a lot about what makes her right for the part. “We knew Alicia had to be someone who had grown up to be the good girl, the rule follower, the one who never stepped out,” says King, who co-created the series with his wife, Michelle. “And, yet, when this scandal happens, she finds there was someone inside her waiting to explode.
“Julianna is such a powerful presence that we knew she could bring that and keep it tamped down until it needed to come out. At the same time, we also needed someone with the skill to play the lighter side, so that you don’t feel you’re reliving Ibsen every week. And because we’d seen her comedy chops on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Scrubs,’ we knew she could do it all.”
Given the emotional shades of her past performances (her role on “ER,” remember, began with the character’s suicide attempt), the most surprising thing about talking with Margulies is how warm and delightful she can be. Quick to laugh and melodious of voice, she offers a rueful comic view of her life in a phone interview from New York, where the series is shot.
“Last time I did a series,” she says, referring to “ER,” “when I was tired I got to go to sleep. And when I had spare time I got to go work out. Now it’s a whole new ballgame.” That’s because now she’s also a real-life wife and mother, which is why things are pretty strictly regimented on the set of “The Good Wife.” Margulies is up every morning at 6 so she can spend a few hours at the park with her 2-year-old son before work. She sometimes doesn’t go home until midnight. “Every moment of my day is accounted for, so no one is unprepared on the set, because if they are, I’ll look at them like, ‘Really?’” she says, laughing.
Twenty-two episodes in, and on this day with just a week of shooting left before hiatus, “we’re all mentally and physically exhausted,” she says, but she’s not complaining. “The truth is, I love this role so much — it has so many layers that it’s incredibly fulfilling to play. Everything that’s involved in being a woman, this woman has to deal with.”
That includes a return to work at a law firm after a 15-year absence, navigating her changed relationship with her husband, who’s back in their home under house arrest, and the struggle to establish a moral foundation for their two questioning teenagers ( Graham Phillips and Makenzie Vega).
Then there’s the rekindling attraction between Alicia and the head of her law firm, Will ( Josh Charles), whom she’d dated before marrying Peter. “There’s a scene in an episode called ‘Bang,’” says Robert King, “where Will is trying to take her off a case because he thinks he’s asking too much of her, and she’s saying that she wants to be there. Bottom line, it’s about the attraction between the two of them. It took about a quarter-page in the script, but when it was shot, it was a minute and 10 seconds. That’s because of what she and Josh did with the space between the lines.”
“She’s wonderful at getting things across without having to speak,” adds Michelle King. “The scene was truly saved by what they did in the playing.”
The seamlessness between what the show’s creators seek and what their stars deliver is perhaps all the more remarkable given that they do their jobs a continent apart. Margulies made her acceptance of the lead role contingent on being able to stay in New York. The Kings write, produce and edit the show from their Art Deco offices in the DeMille building at Culver Studios in Culver City, which allows them to maintain their own family life in L.A. The arrangement is unusual but not unprecedented — their New York executive producer, Brooke Kennedy, who oversees the set, had previously worked in similar circumstances.
For Margulies, part of the fun of remaining in New York is the immediate feedback she gets from people in the streets, who seem caught up in which way Alicia’s heart will turn. “I was in Washington Square Park the other day and I found out there are two ‘teams,’” she says, obviously tickled by the idea. “Most of the men are on the Peter Florrick team, and they’ll come up and tell me that. The women will say, ‘Oh, no. I’m on the Will Garner team.’ People have a real investment in her choices, and I love that. There’s a little bit for everyone in the show.”