Kathy Bates on How ‘Matlock’ Rescued Her From Semi-Retirement: “This Is Unlike Anything I’ve Ever Experienced”
Don’t call it a reboot, because, as many viewers have discovered, the new CBS drama Matlock starring Oscar winner Kathy Bates is everything but.
By now, it’s an open secret that Jane the Virgin creator Jennie Snyder Urman has done it again. With Matlock, Urman hasn’t simply taken an established IP and swapped in Bates for Andy Griffith’s original Ben Matlock. Instead, she’s turned the show on its head with her premiere twist, leaning into the familiar to deliver the totally unexpected. Bates’ Madeline “Matty” Matlock is folksy, not because she naturally is, but because societal expectations prefer women of a certain age that way.
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For Matty, it’s an invitation to use society’s low expectations of older women for a greater good. And in this case, it’s to infiltrate the power law firm Jacobson Moore to find the critical documents they buried that could have taken opioids from their client off the market 10 years earlier, possibly preventing her addicted daughter’s death. To do that, Matty reinvents herself as an older lawyer whose dead no-good husband gambled away their money, forcing her to dust off her law degree to support herself and her teen grandson.
Within the opening minutes of the show, Matty has snuck into a meeting at Jacobson Moore to maneuver a job with the firm by delivering important intel she’s dug up about one of their cases. When asked how she knows by the founder’s son Julian (Jason Ritter), she lays out her main weapon, only no one is truly paying attention.
“Well, you see, there’s this funny thing that happens when women age. We become damn near invisible,” she says, before lowering the boom. “Plus, it’s useful,” she continues, “because nobody sees us coming.”
And, they don’t see her coming. To them, she’s the poor old lawyer Madeline Matlock, when, in actuality, she’s the wealthy Madeline Kingston raising her grandson Alfie (Aaron D. Harris) with her very much alive and extremely supportive husband Edwin (Sam Anderson).
At work, Matty slowly gains the respect and trust of her much younger colleagues — the tightly wound type-A overachiever Sarah (Leah Lewis) and the more congenial working-class Billy (David Del Rio). Together they all report to and support legal star Olympia (Skye P. Marshall), one of Matty’s main suspects. The other two are Julian, Olympia’s ex and father of her twins, and his father Senior, one of the firm’s founders, played by Emmy and Golden Globe winner Beau Bridges.
Everyone there takes the bait, accepting that Matty is who she says she is. As she works her way closer towards her goal. With heavy assistance from Alfie as well as Edwin, Matty feels herself growing closer to her colleagues, especially her boss Olympia. But she also finds herself in danger of blowing her cover every step of the way. And, in between that, the show takes on intriguing cases that consistently raise moral and ethical questions highly relevant to the real here and now.
Bates spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about her buzzy new show, revealing why she said yes to what may be her final role and, more importantly, how she was even able to commit to it, as well as the intergenerational tissue that is bringing audiences of all ages together.
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What made you want to do Matlock?
The main thing was the script, as always, and the twist of the end. When I read it, I realized that it wasn’t just an episodic — it had a serious story to tell, but also a mission that would run throughout the whole arc of the season. And so that very much attracted me. When I’m acting, I like to have something that has substance, that has meaning, something that I can really dig into. And then I met Jennie Urman, and I liked her tremendously, and I felt that we would have a good collaboration.
I assume you had no intentions of taking on a regular series.
No, it hadn’t occurred to me. Quite frankly, I was thinking about going into semi-retirement, and just waiting to see what came along that I might like to do. So I really wasn’t looking to do anything for a while. So this came as a total surprise to me, and continues to be because of the latest numbers that we’ve gotten. [Editor’s note: The show got the network’s best series premiere audience in five years]. We’re all just so excited about everything, and CBS is excited. There have been some wonderful articles about the network and how they’ve really pulled ahead, and been very wise in their programming and marketing. I just feel so lucky to have such a strong foundation behind us and the show. It’s a miracle; we all keep pinching ourselves. The crew loves it. The actors love it. I know everyone says that when they’re marketing a show, but this is really unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I really can’t believe all this, especially at my age.
One of the things Matlock shows is that people can still be vibrant in their 70s.
I’ve talked about this often in the press recently that, over the last six years, I’ve worked really hard and lost a lot of weight. In the last couple of years, I’ve really focused on it and gotten almost down to what I weighed when I was in college. The confluence of my being healthy and then the show coming along was just serendipity. I’m in good shape. I can walk, I can breathe, whereas before on different shows, I had to sit down every two to three minutes. Sadly, I really let myself go over the years, and then developed diabetes. So that’s what really kickstarted me into getting healthy.
Your health is important, because Matty is quite active.
I don’t think she could have taken this on if she hadn’t been in good shape, because she has to go back to work. She hasn’t been back to work in 10 years. I also think that the mission that she finds herself on with her grandson is a restorative one. You know they’ve been in mourning for such a long time because of the death of her daughter, and when she decides to go on this mission with her grandson, it just rejuvenates them. It’s given them purpose.
The intergenerational aspect of the show is quite astounding. You see Matty with her grandson. You see Matty with her superior in Olympia, who is still quite younger than her, and with her co-workers Billy and Sarah who are even younger. We don’t get to see as much on screen, because there’s such niche marketing to appeal to this group or that group.
They’re so young. And, in some ways, she looks at them as what her daughter could have accomplished had she lived, because her daughter was always in love with the show Matlock and wanted to be a lawyer like her mother. So when she meets the kids, and they’re so different, they come from different walks of life. It’s interesting to her at first. I think she wonders if she can fit in. She finds herself in a law firm where there are various lawyers at various ages, and the world has changed. She doesn’t understand some of their Gen Z speak. I’m not sure I’m even calling it the right generation. I really don’t know.
Then in Olympia, I think she doesn’t expect to find such a formidable adversary. So I love the variety. I love that Beau’s [character Senior] is older, and that he’s created this firm. Certainly, she’s very suspicious of him and of [his son] Julian, but she’s expecting to find a lawyer like Julian who’s so charming. So it’s a whole panoply of people of different ages, and I think that’s one of the reasons why it appeals to so many people. They’re all from different walks of life, and that’s one thing that has excited all of us. All of us have had calls and emails from friends or people that we know, and they’re all completely different, different ages, different walks of life, like the people in the firm. They’ve all found something within the show they can relate to. That’s very powerful to be able to reach all those people.
In this, you’re playing two different roles, because Madeline Matlock is one person, and Madeline Kingston is another one.
Yes, that’s very attractive to me to be able to do that. [Matty’s] created this character that she can play, and be incognito and charming. That’s very exciting to me as an actor, to be able to play two different types of people and yet it’s the same woman. It’s very challenging. That’s one of the things that really drew me to the part.
One of the questions that seems to come up with Matty, even early in the show, is: Do the ends justify the means? She’s on a hunt to find out who in the firm protected Big Pharma, essentially contributing to her daughter’s death. But, as she goes about her mission, she’s forming real emotional attachments and, at different points, she knows she’s being dishonest.
I think that’s a real problem for her, and it’s something unexpected for her to have feelings. Certainly, her feelings for Olympia are growing tremendously, and she has to keep her own feelings in check since she doesn’t know whether Olympia is the person behind this. She also works with the kids, but I think she really is focusing on Senior and on Julian. It really eats at her. One of the episodes, she slams [Olympia’s] computer and says, “We’re not friends, we’re not friends, we’re not friends, we’re not friends.” But, on the other hand, she has to become close to Olympia and appears to be her friend. It’s very difficult just to manage her real feelings for Olympia against her deep, deep feelings for her daughter.
Of course, I don’t have children at all, and I’ve never had children. I’ve never chosen to have children. I remember talking to a friend of mine who has a child and [asking], “What is this love that you experience as a mother?” And she said, “It’s savage.” Another woman I talked to said, if anybody messes with her kid, that’s it. So I think that, coupled with the fact that her daughter died of something that could have been prevented if people hadn’t been so effing greedy, and all of the research that I did [on Big Pharma companies], books that I’ve read [about] nefarious things they did just to get their product out there and to make it stronger so more people would take it and need it, it was just horrifying to me, and I’m sure it was to Matty too, and it fueled her quest to do what was right by her daughter.
It’s nice to see the relationship Matty has with her husband, though she lies to everyone at work and says she has none. We see older couples, but we don’t often see the kind of long-term partnership Matty and Edwin have.
Yeah, I’m so happy we’re doing that. I love Sam so much. And it turns out that we were in a class [together] years and years ago, and I didn’t remember. I was very eager for him to be the husband. He has the most wonderful face. It’s full of light, and he has a wonderful vibe as a human being. He’s tender and kind with everyone. [As Edwin], he’s married to a woman with an A-type personality, and he’s very supportive of her. And he’s her soft place to fall. I think it’s important to show those kinds of relationships. There are a lot of long-term relationships. I had a friend whose husband just passed away, and they were married for 59 years, and another that I’m very close to, and they were married for nearly 60 years, not without their tribulations and their troubles over the years. But I wonder what that’s like, and we don’t see it reflected, and we should. Everybody has feelings for their partners. Our hearts are alive until we die, and we can be attracted to people and enjoy their company and find out who we are with that person. It’s like that quote from Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist I often [paraphrase], “It’s not whether you love someone, it’s who you are when you’re with them; you love who you are when you’re with them.” I can’t imagine it because I’ve never been in a relationship that lasted that long, but it’s wonderful to have it on television. It really is.
It’s wonderful to have you on television. You won an Oscar in your 40s, so hopefully you’re winning the leading actress Emmy in your 70s.
Well, from your mouth to God’s ears. It would be lovely. We had a great time, Skye Marshall, who I’ve just loved working with, who plays Olympia; we had a blast at the Emmys this last year. We went and it was so much fun. And so I hope we’re there next year. I hope the whole show is there. And I have to pay tribute to Jennie because we wouldn’t be here without her. I look at her and I think, “How did all of this come out of her head?” And, how does she feel about all of this, seeing it come to life, and then seeing people react in the way they do? I mean, I just get chills.
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Matlock first premiered with a sneak episode on Sept. 22, followed by a pilot encore on Oct. 10. The series has now moved to its regular time, Thursdays at 9 p.m. on CBS.
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