Appreciation tumblr for "The Good Wife", "Sports Night", Josh Charles.
Part of Josh Charles Online
Josh Charles is currently filming a new movie called Bird People and is being directed by Pascale Ferran.
From DailyVoice.com, the movie is a:
French production about an American man who travels to France on a business trip and discovers new things about himself while leaving his past behind.
The 40-year-old, who first rose to prominence in “Dead Poets Society” and on “Sports Night,” now stars as Alicia’s old flame-turned-boss on the hit CBS drama.
I must confess that I didn’t expect to like CBS’s The Good Wife when I first heard about it, shortly before its premiere in the fall of 2009. Firstly, the title seemed to imply that it wasn’t exactly aimed at people who fall into the demographics that I do—young, male, and heterosexual. Secondly, the premise seemed to be drawn directly the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal and the public humiliation that it caused his wife Silda Wall Spitzer, which struck me as a gimmick that couldn’t possibly sustain itself for very long. And, thirdly, the broadcast networks hadn’t—and haven’t—exactly been on a hot streak, in recent years, in terms of producing dramas of a quality comparable to those that air on the cable and premium-cable networks, so, despite the fact that this one was set to feature some very talented New York actors, I doubted that any truly smart, edgy show made by and for adults would have wound up at the former rather than the latter.
How wrong I was. The Good Wife hooked me from the very first episode of its first season (2009-2010) through the very last episode of its third and most recent season (2011-2012), with its multitude of complex characters, intersecting narratives, and provocatively entertaining socio-cultural commentary. And, while the broadcast networks generally remain a wasteland in terms of quality drama series, The Good Wife has emerged as its last and best bastion of hope in the top category at the Golden Globe Awards (one nomination for best drama series), Screen Actors Guild Awards (three nominations for best ensemble), and Emmy Awards (two nominations for best drama series), where it is regularly the only broadcast nominee chosen to compete against a plethora of cable competitors.
The show has yet to win the highest honor at any of those ceremonies, but its actors have certainly been recognized at them. Prizes have been awarded to lead actress Julianna Margulies (a Golden Globe Award, two SAG Awards, and an Emmy) and supporting actress Archie Panjabi (an Emmy), while other contributors—regulars (Christine Baranski, Chris Noth), guest stars (Dylan Baker, Michael J. Fox), and people who have been both (Alan Cumming)—have accumulated a considerable number of nominations.
Prior to this time last year, though, one actor with a role as central to the series as anyone but Margulies’ had somehow slipped completely under the awards radar: Josh Charles, the 40-year-old who plays the show’s most prominently-featured male character, Will Gardner. To its credit, though, the TV Academy righted that wrong last summer by nominating Charles for a best supporting actor Emmy (he lost to his old pal Peter Dinklage from Game of Thrones), and may well do so again this year.
Last week, I met up with Charles at his publicists’ office in New York for an interview about his life and work. While the formal portion of the interview lasted for 38 minutes (see the video at the top of this post), the entire conversation was much longer, beginning beforehand in the waiting room, thanks to Charles’ early arrival, and continuing well afterwards as we walked a half-dozen city blocks through the pouring rain, under Charles’ umbrella, to a subway station from which we would both return to our homes. I knew before I ever met Charles that he was a terrific actor. But what I didn’t know, and am pleased to report, on the basis of both our on-the-record and off-the-record time together, is that he also seems to be as lovely and decent as any of the more than 350 people in show business who I have interviewed over the past decade.
Josh Charles was born on September 15, 1971 in Baltimore, where he was also raised, and his career path was pretty much established before he was even a teenager. Charles—the son of Laura, a gossip columnist for the Baltimore Sun, and Allan, a commercial director for an advertising agency—says that his decision to become a child actor was entirely his own, but that his parents were always very supportive of his dream. In hindsight, he says, “I’ve always questioned if that was the right decision to make so early, but it wasn’t something that I felt I really had control over; it just was where my passion was.”He realized that much at the age of 10, thanks to two formative events. The first involved comedy and the second a summer camp.
“I was really into Richard Pryor,” he says. “I used to have his tapes and his records, and I used to imitate all his bits. I was just obsessed with him—which sounds really crazy for a young kid, I know, because his comedy could be very, very dark and risqué—but I was, and I would channel him, and I tihink I did a pretty good impersonation of him at the time.” Meanwhile, he continues, “A guy who worked for my father, who also did comedy, hosted an open-mic night… We went to watch him one night—my parents took me—and, like, I was a really precocious punk kid, and I yelled, heckled something out, and he called me up on the stage and kind of made fun of me, like, ‘What’s a 10-year-old doing here in this place?!’ And, I don’t know, I said something back, and got a laugh, and [thought], ‘Oh, that’s kind of exciting, to be on stage!’”
Later that same year, Charles’ parents divorced, and he headed off to sleep-away camp for the first time, at the Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Training Center in upstate New York, feeling a mixture of nervousness and excitement. He quickly came to love the place, at which he says he took “amazing acting classes,” including one in “theater games” that was taught by a young counselor named Mark Saks, who, if you can believe it, later became the casting director on The Good Wife and, along with Margulies, recruited Charles for the show. “It just changed my life, that place, in so many ways—just great summers, a great learning experience, getting to play Reverend Hale in The Crucible when I was, like, 12, you know?” Moreover, he notes, “There were children’s managers that would come up and watch the productions, and that’s how I got my first manager, and therefore got my first gigs.”
Charles first movie was the original Hairspray (1988), directed by John Waters, which he remembers as “a huge deal” because, I mean, he’s such an iconic figure in Baltimore” and “was just a hoot” during production. He followed that film soon after with a role as a prep school student in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989), which was tremendously received and scored Oscar nominations for best picture, best director, best actor, and best original screenplay, the last of which it won. The only downside to the “memorable and great” experience of making it, Charles says, was that it set the bar so high that few subsequent projects could ever meet it.
(Of Dead Poets Society’s classic “Oh Captain, my Captain” denouement, Charles recalls, “Weir liked to use music a lot on the set to keep us relaxed for the mood of the scene, something that I took from him that I still use to this day… But he had this, like, terrible boom box. It wasn’t very good. And my dad had a really good Bose one, and brought it up, and he was playing the music from The Mission, Ennio Morricone’s score for The Mission. And I remember my dad said, ‘Well, you can use this boom box,’ and so [Weir] did. So I remember, when we were actually shooting that scene, Peter was playing that beautiful score from The Mission. So, every time I hear that, it always comes into my mind. Nobody would know, seeing it, because the film ended up being scored by Maurice Jarre, which was also a beautiful score, but that song was always in my head. And it was played on my father’s Bose boom box.”)
Over the next decade, Charles kept plugging along in film roles of varying size and importance, and then scored a part that introduced him to the medium of television, and reintroduced him to the public as a grown man: Dan Rydell, a fictional sports anchor, on Aaron Sorkin’s first television series Sports Night (1998-2000), 45 episodes of which aired on ABC before the show was rather abruptly canceled. “To be perfectly honest, I can’t say it was always the easiest experience to be a part of,” Charles says. “I mean, we knew we were making stuff that was really good; perhaps if the show was on a different network, at a different time— Who knows? There’s so many different variables that go into what makes a show click. We had a cult following. People were passionate about it. And, critically, people seemed to respond to it. But people weren’t watching it to the level that I think ABC needed at that time.” On the upside, he says, several people who worked on the show have become close friends, including costars Peter Krause and Josh Malina, and, he adds, “Getting into that grind [of churning out a regular network series] was very good for me,” as it taught him what to expect in the future and how to prepare for it.
Between the end of Sports Night and the beginning of The Good Wife, though, it wasn’t at all obvious that Charles would ever get another chance to headline a major series. He worked less often than he had before, and, when he did appear on screens big or small, it was usually in smaller roles in smaller projects. The role and project that seemed to reinvigorate him and his career—indeed, in which he did some of his best work ever—was the part of Jake, a Stanley Kowalski-esque man trying to save his rocky relationship with his unhappily-pregnant wife Amy by going to counseling, on season one of HBO’s dialogue-driven In Treatment (1998-2000), which was adapted from a series on Israeli television. “It’s unlike anything I’ve done,” says Charles, who says the show contains some of the work “that I’m most proud of.” He continues, “It really was as close to doing a play on film as you can [get]. I mean, sometimes you would have, you know, eight-, nine-, 10-minute takes.” He also personally connected to the material for two reasons. One: “Therapy is something that’s been very important to me in my life, so it was great to sort of look at it and work on the text with Embeth [Davidtz, who played Amy], and Gabriel [Bryne, who played the therapist], and with our directors, and kind of make it our own.” And two: “The fact that it’s something that started in Israel gave me, as a Jew, a tremendous sense of pride, to be perfectly frank with you. There’s such great creativity coming out of that country, and a lot of times we don’t always hear about that.”
Around the time that In Treatment was airing, Charles got a call from two old friends—Saks, his camp counselor-turned-casting director, and Julianna Margulies, the actress who was then best known for her work on E.R. (1994-2009), who Charles says he had met years earlier in L.A. through mutual friends and had been a friend ever since—about a pilot called The Good Wife. He remembers, “[Margulies] said, ‘Hey, I’m doing this pilot, and I think there’s a great role for you in it… We’re going to shoot the pilot in Vancouver. But, if the show goes, it’s shooting here in New York.’ And so I read it. I felt like the writing was really sharp. I love Jules, obviously. And it just seemed like something that would be a really fun experience.” He adds that he was particularly excited that the project, if picked up, would shoot in New York, where he lives. Not long thereafter, CBS was sold on the pilot, picked up the show, and, in September 2009, started airing it on Tuesday nights at 10pm. (It stayed in that slot until the start of season three, when it moved to the much more competitive timeslot of Sunday nights at 9pm.) And so began Charles’ association with the role for which he is now perhaps best known: Will Gardner, the professionally ambitious and personally frustrated partner at the law firm of Lockhart & Gardner.
While the show’s central character is Margulies’ Alicia Florrick, its greatest drama seems to come from the conflicted relationship that exists between Florrick and Gardner, two fundamentally decent characters who seem to bring out the best in each other, just like the actors who play them. (Charles attributes his great chemistry with Margulies to the fact that their relationship is grounded upon a similar real-life “bond,” albeit not a romantic one.)
For those who need a refresher: Alicia and Will first met and dated 15 years earlier, when they were both students at Georgetown Law. Afterwards, they had gone their separate ways, with Alicia marrying Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), the future state’s attorney and sacrificing her career to become a stay-at-home mother to their two children, and Will marrying his work, as a partner with Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) at one of Chicago’s premier law firms. After it is revealed that Peter had engaged in a Spitzer-like sex scandal, Alicia, clearly conflicted about how to respond, stands by his side at the press conference at which he announces his resignation, and then moves on with her life without him, retaining custody of their children and trying to find a firm that will give her a chance to return to the law. Will, for reasons as much personal as professional, gives her that chance, and, inevitably, sparks again begin to fly between the two. (As Charles says, “Having her come back into his orbit, I think, reawakened his passion for the law a bit, reawakened his emotional feelings that maybe he had put down.”)
While Peter is certainly not the most appealing character, Will is not without flaws either. “Will is a gambler,” Charles emphasizes. “I mean, literally, figuratively, it’s in his genetic makeup. He likes the rush of it, the adrenaline of it. And he’s utilized it, I think quite brilliantly, in his career, for his firm, for his clients. He’s not afraid to sort of cut corners to get things done. And it’s served him well in business, but… hasn’t served him well in his personal life,” which is basically non-existent, aside from a few meaningless flings that he’s had over the years. “This past season we really got to see him pay a real price for what he’s chosen to focus on in his life and what he’s ignored.” He notes that there are “a lot of lonely characters in the show,” and that Will is certainly one of them—along with virtually all of the people who populate his law firm (including the also-excellent Panjabi, Cumming, and Matt Czuchry). “I think there’s something really interesting about that, exploring that in today’s America and work.”
As a show that airs on a broadcast network, as opposed to premium cable, the team behind The Good Wife faces a set of challenges and demands: they have to churn out 22 or 23 episodes a season (whereas some cable shows produce as few as eight), which means they have to work for nine months out of the year (whereas cable shows, and even half-hour network shows, provide much more off-time); they have to convey their point within strict censorship rules (whereas cable shows can pretty much say or show whatever they would like); and they have to remain gripping despite frequent commercial interruptions. “It is very difficult,” Charles admits, but he insists that the show has provided him with “truly one of the best experiences I’ve had in television, really because of the cast and the crew—we’re all really close.”
Robert King and Michelle King, the husband-wife team that co-created The Good Wife and serve as its showrunners, run the writers room from Los Angeles while the show shoots in New York—which poses as Chicago, at some times more successfully than others—under the supervision of one of its executive producers, Brooke Kennedy. “It’s probably not the norm,” Charles notes, “but it’s worked for us.” The Kings, he says, “come in throughout the year periodically, and we have our discussions and sort of meetings about where the next arch is going for the next six to eight episodes.” He finds himself constantly impressed by “how good the writing is, you know, how brilliant Robert and Michelle King are… I would put their writing on par with anyone I’ve worked with… You don’t always know that people are going to be able to sustain it… These guys just keep turning out interesting material… There’s drama on the show. There’s comedy. There’s sort of satire at times. They stay very current, but they’re always trying to find a different angle.”
Though the show has managed to juggle dozens of engaging and intersecting narratives that touch upon a wide variety of topics (see this recent New Yorker article for a list of tech-related examples), the audience seems most engaged by its most fundamental question: will—or should—Alicia return to her remorseful husband Peter (as a “good wife” might do), or enter into a relationship with her old flame Will (as she did for a 10-episode arc spanning the end of season two through the first half of season three), or remain on her own (as a hard-working woman in the 21st century certainly reserves the right to do)?
Many—probably even most—audience members are rooting for Alicia and Will to wind up together, and some of them have expressed exasperation that one thing or another always seems to keep them apart. That is music to Charles’ ears. “I think if you’re pleasing everybody, you’re doing something wrong.” He says, “At its core, these two people are really, really close friends. Yes, there’s a romantic attraction, and we saw the intimacy increase and then, sort of, blow apart this year. Just because it increased didn’t mean that all the obstacles that were in there were going to immediately disappear. There’s many reasons that they shouldn’t be together. He is her boss. She has a family. It’s difficult.” He goes on, “In a perfect time where everything was sort of equal maybe they would be together, but I think there is this sort of quality where it’s meeting each other at the wrong time, you know?”
Asked for his own prediction about where Alicia and Will’s relationship is heading, as well as where he would like to see it head, Charles pauses for a bit to mull over his response. He eventually replies, “I think the ultimate thing that you’ll see—and that you maybe saw a little bit towards the end of this season in that final scene between them in the elevator—was just that where their relationship’s shifting to now is just, like, a deeper place… It’s not romantic, but, in an odd way, may be more enduring because it’s deeper. So I like that, and it’ll be interesting to see where they go with that… I never envisioned that the two of them are necessarily [going to have] an endgame where they sort of walk off into the sunset… I don’t know, and I’m happy to just be surprised by it.”
Finally, of course, I have to ask Charles about the Emmys, at which he has been—and is once again—eligible in one of the most competitive categories, best supporting actor in a drama. (On top of the same competition that existed last year, Breaking Bad, which was ineligible at the time, returns this year with two strong contenders in the category, Giancarlo Esposito and Aaron Paul.) Charles says, “It was a great honor to be nominated [last year], and I would be thrilled if it happened again. Honestly, it means a lot. But it’s really not what drives me in what I do. It’s just not. I mean, the work is what drives me, and wanting to do good work and get better and better.” He adds, “I feel like this last season I did some work that I was really proud of, and that’s not always easy for me to say… I have no idea if it’s the kind of work that inspires people to nominate you or not.”
He doesn’t have much time to think about it, either: “We’re about to start in a couple of weeks on season four!”
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Hey everyone! Catching up on the last few weeks screen captures from The Good Wife:
Great article from TVGuide and interview with the series creators Robert and Michelle King:
He survived the wrath of Peter Florrick and the State’s Attorney office, but Will Gardner (Josh Charles) was no match for the Illinois State Bar Association on Sunday’s episode of The Good Wife. Faced with the possibility of losing his law license forever, Will took responsibility for that $45,000 loan and agreed to a six-month suspension. So what’s next? How will his time away from the law change Will? How will Lockhart Gardner Lockhart and Associates, and Alicia (Julianna Margulies), change without him? TVGuide.com spoke with show bosses Robert and Michelle King to get our burning questions answered.
How long has this been in the works?
Robert King: We started this year thinking the theme would be about risk. It really turned fairly quickly into being about consequences. Our people have a lot of close scrapes and get off. This one felt like it should come down like a lot of bricks on Will’s head. And we didn’t want to just disbar him completely.Why was it important for Will in particular to kind of face more serious consequences?
Michelle King: It felt real. There were big threats against Will and we wanted to show that yes, in fact he was going to feel the pain and there were going to be changes in his life and in the show.
Robert King: It’s like the first year when there was a competition between Cary and Alicia. There’s a term TV writers called ‘Schmuck Bait,’ which is the idea that there are some plots that you know aren’t going to happen, like Superman is not going to die. Having Cary actually be fired in Season 1 felt like we were taking these threats very seriously and avoiding ‘Schmuck Bait’. For Will, it felt like there really needed to be repercussions from it.How will Will continue to be a part of the show if he can’t practice law or go to the firm?
Robert King: He’s in every episode, but it is a delicate dance. There is the dance of what you are allowed to do as a business partner in that firm, and what you’re prevented from doing as a lawyer. This is difficult for Will and he really wants to honor the suspension too.Will viewers just see him at home or will he take up new hobbies or maybe a new job?
Robert King: We’re going to see his home and meet his sisters. This allows us to open up a little more of Will’s private life.How is he going handle being away from the law in the long-term?
Robert King: In the episode, Diane says, ‘You can’t take six months. It will kill you.’ There’s a part of Will that wants to prove people wrong. That there is stuff that he has put aside. He really wants to take this seriously and rebuild his private life and who he is. It gives us a new flavor in who Will is.
But on the other hand, the high intensity work in the law is a drug. There are withdrawals associated with that. There is something built into Will that is competitive and that is also a corner cutter. Some of these things can’t be worked out of him and they’re just going to find other outlets.Now that he has more free time, will there be new special someone in his life?
Michelle King: You’ll have to tune in to see.How will Will’s absence affect Alicia?
Robert King: It will be interesting to see how much they can pivot to a new level in their friendships/working relationships especially with this monkey wrench thrown into Will’s life. Alicia feels guilty, but she does not want to stoke fires that could take her in a dangerous direction. You can prevent yourself from being put in places where you have that kind of emotional connection.
Michelle King: In addition to that, Alicia’s life gets more complicated because one of the main partners is on suspension and suddenly everyone in the firm has to take on more work including Alicia.How else will his suspension affect the rest of the firm?
Robert King: Will was someone who carried quite a bit of the load for the firm. A lot of that gets disbursed and there’s also a power vacuum which draws a lot of interlopers. It makes things much more complicated. … We’re going to see David Lee, Julius Cain and Eli Gold butt heads because we just enjoy it. The three of them playing together is like watching the Marx Brothers.How long will this suspension last on the show? Will this continue into next season?
Robert King: I think we’re going to suggest that the six months takes us through the end of this season.How will the firm change during his sabbatical?
Robert King: The reality is that you have to fight your way back through because, in many ways, you’ve lost your clients to other lawyers. You don’t just come back with all the clout that you left with.
So, what do you think is gonna happen to Will now?
I’ve added 2 new photoshoots! Enjoy.
Josh is featured on the February 17 issue of Entertainment Weekly, on the “On My Ipod” feature. Thanks Kelly from DanielGillies.org for the scan.
Kalinda fooled me! And who else wants to punch Wendy? Here are caps from the episode!
Screen captures from this week’s episode, sorry for being a bit late.
I’ve added screen captures from last night’s episode of The Good Wife.
CBS’ award-winning drama The Good Wife was the first panel to sell out at the star-heavy New York Times Arts & Leisure Weekend this past Friday. One hot topic for stars Julianna Margulies, Christine Baranski, Josh Charles, and executive producers Robert and Michelle King was the show’s move to Sundays this season, which hasn’t helped ratings. Especially frustrating was the fact that football often pushed back the start time of the drama — “Will football ever end?” Baranski moaned to an appreciative female-heavy audience.
Also up for discussion: the romance between Alicia and Will. When a fan expressed disappointment over their breakup, Charles said he believed the relationship ended “appropriately” and said he’s happy about the deepening friendship between Will and both Alicia and Diane. Baranski joked that she’d like a hot young love interest, while Margulies mentioned her shock at a letter she got from a disgruntled viewer who suggested they call the show The Good Slut because of Alicia’s affair. “Do they watch the show? Do they know that Peter not only slept with hookers but colleagues?” she said indignantly. (Margulies also shared that they dubbed the sex scenes ‘frucks.’)
The Kings revealed that both Diane and Carey (Matt Czuchry) were originally conceived to be adversaries of Alicia, but they “fell in love” with both the characters and actors and made them more likeable. That prompted a retort from Charles that they should hire more “a-holes.”
As for how much longer the stories of Lockhart Gardner will continue, Robert King said each year “is another chapter in Alicia’s life. We have an ending [to the series] in mind.” Though they all agree they’d like to keep trying cases for years to come. Asked Baranski: “Does it ever have to end?”
Josh Charles in #7 on this year’s People’s Sexiest Man Alive List! Awesome!
“I’m not interested in playing a character and having him be called ‘likable,’” Charles, who plays enigmatic lawyer Will Gardner on The Good Wife, tells EW. It’s precisely that mystique that has made the 39-year-old actor so irresistible to Julianna Margulies’s character, Alicia – and to audiences who tune in Sundays to the hit CBS drama.
From: People.com
Screen captures from this week’s episode of The Good Wife “3x11 - What Went Wrong Screen”. The show will be on hiatus until January 15.
These are caps from last week episode of The Good Wife “3x10 Parenting Made Easy”. Sorry about the delay!
http://josh-charles.com/wp/wp-admin/post-new.php
If you haven’t seen the latest episode yet, beware of spoilers! Great article from EW.com:
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Do you think the idea to make Will’s pickup basketball game with fellow lawyers and judges the alleged center of a judicial bribery scheme was in the back of producers’ minds the first time we saw him on the court?
JOSH CHARLES: That’s a question for [creators] Robert and Michelle [King]. I don’t know if it was part of the grand master plan. My instinct would say that they strive really hard to make people’s backstories mirror what we’ve seen on the surface so that things don’t feel like they’re pulled from left field. I think if you go back and look at the way Will handles himself business-wise, and his relationship with Tony Goldwyn’s character [Judge Baxter] with gambling issues, you can sorta see that maybe this stuff was imagined. I think it makes sense for who Will is. There’s a touch of the gambler in anybody really competitive and somebody that’s willing to concede that to succeed, sometimes you need to cut corners and to make bold choices. When you ask the reasoning for Will not sharing [news of the investigation with Alicia], there is this belief in certain gamblers that one take can make this all go away. I think maybe he’s still hoping that that can happen with this, that maybe he won’t have to share the information with Alicia.
Diane said she knows it’s not true that he’s a part of this alleged judicial bribery scheme. Should viewers be so sure?
By saying this, I’m not answering that one way or the other. I think what’s so great about the show is when we read scripts and see certain twists and turns, we discuss them and three different people can have three different ideas. I’m talking about another episode [in particular] that we were just talking about recently and a scene we shot that had nothing to do with this. That’s what they do so well in the writing. People can interpret it how they want to in some ways, and that leaves stuff open for discussion. In that regard, I don’t think anything is that black and white. Will is not some prince. Across the board on this show, we’ve seen lawyers and investigators push things to the brink. So much of the show is seeing Alicia get her hands dirtier this year and step into this moral abyss of the legal world of Chicago. I wouldn’t presume to tell viewers to think anything other than just think whatever they think.No one likes to be told what to do, even if the person doing the talking is right. What can you tease about how Will will react to Diane telling him to stop sleeping with Alicia and to make this investigation go away?
I think people should just keep tuning in. It’s only gonna get more interesting. What’s so nice is the family dynamic that a workplace creates. The dynamic of Diane and Will and their relationship and having her be the person, which is appropriate, to confront him about it. It works on different levels. It’s not only your partner, it’s also someone who you view as a friend, as an associate, as an ally. I think it did kind of rock Will a little bit, and I think what’s nice is to see Will pay the price a little bit personally and professionally. I’ll leave it at that.I loved seeing Diane and Eli having a drink together. That’s what we’re used to seeing her do with Will. Should Will be nervous about them bonding?
Eli is just sort of hydrogen, and it’s interesting to see how he fits into the scheme of the office now that he’s in there [Laughs] and how he interacts with the other characters and certainly the partners. I don’t think Will feels threatened by that at this point. He’s got bigger fish to fry right now.Let’s talk about Cary. How gung-ho do you think he is on this investigation now? It was hard to tell when Wendy was briefing him on the change in objective.
What I get out of it is that the character is conflicted. I don’t think Cary’s necessarily gung-ho to try to bring Will down. Obviously, we made the decision not to retain him, then tried to bring him back and that didn’t work. But I think what’s great for the character is that he’s been able to thrive over [at the state’s attorney’s office] and the dynamic between him and Peter working together. What’s cool about the show is that we have this great ensemble. There’s enough to give people so they feel like their characters are growing. It’s such a marathon, these nine months, that I welcome it.Out of curiosity, how many takes did it take you to say the line, “We lose cheese, we lose our quarter” without laughing?
I think it would be safe to say that if you rounded up the crew and the rest of cast and asked them who’s the naughtiest when it comes to giggling while we’re shooting, it would probably be me. And I’m not saying that necessarily proudly, but I would say it’s a matter of fact. The idea that I don’t know if I even laughed at that line, I would say there’s a solid 70 percent chance that I did. [Laughs] It’s something I’m trying to work on, but certain people just make me laugh. I laugh with Jules. I laugh with Christine quite often. I laugh with Archie. I can’t help it. I certainly laughed a whole lot with Linda Emond [who played the military court judge]. It was so nice that they found a way to bring her and Patrick Breen’s characters back with the military court. I love the dynamic between the judge and Will.Why did he repeat aloud the things she caught him whispering to Alicia? Did he think she’d respect him coming clean, or did he just think he had nothing else to lose?
I thought it was a genius bit of writing because I think Will was just like, Ah, f— it. This is not even worth engaging in, so I’m gonna try to embrace it with some humor, and hope that the humor will return some courtesy in the courtroom.Last question: You just made People‘s Sexiest Man Alive issue. I worry that Will’s so occupied with other things right now, we’re not going to see another sex scene anytime soon. Will we?
I don’t know. I really can’t talk about that. There’s certainly enough sex on the show going around between the triangle over there in the state’s attorney’s office. I think we’re well-covered here on the show.
I love those scenes because everything’s always done right out of frame. The writers get away with so much because they do it smartly.
You have to. Again, you got to tip your hat to Robert and Michelle. There’s certain things that you can do on cable that you can’t do here on network TV, so then you have to think outside the box a little bit. And that was no pun intended, by the way. [Laughs] I think they do think outside the box quite a bit.
