How ‘Pauses' Informed Carrie Preston's New Full-Time Take on ‘Very Unconventional' Character in ‘Elsbeth'

02/07/2024

If you didn't watch Robert and Michelle King's "The Good Wife" and/or "The Good Fight" during the collective 14 years it was airing, first of all, what are you waiting for? Second, you may not know Carrie Preston or her singular guest turn on both series as cunning, yet scatterbrained lawyer Elsbeth Tascioni. On top of co-starring in last year's holiday favorite "The Holdovers," Preston is now taking the lead role with spin-off TV series "Elsbeth," a crime procedural in the vein of "Columbo" and "Poker Face." Despite having played the character a number of times now, in a recent piece for the Los Angeles Times, Preston said she's still finding out new things about this fan favorite character.

"Over ‘The Good Wife' and ‘The Good Fight,' I played her 19 times, but that's over 14 years," she said. "To now be able to do it every day, I'm learning a lot about the character as I go along, but I think always back to the very beginning when I first got the script, what drew me in was the writer wrote a lot of pauses. Just the word ‘pause.' And I was like, ‘OK, if I can figure out what's going on in the pauses, then that's going to inform what this person is because there's something happening there. I don't want to just throw that away. I want to dig into that.' So that then, became kind of the key to her way of thinking, which is very unconventional."

Even though she was happy to return time and time again as a guest, being the lead of a show, especially one revolving around such an odd character, felt like a big risk to Preston.

"At first, I got nervous because I was like, ‘Oh, no, wait, wait. I'm the side dish. I'm the funny one. I'm the quirky thing. … They're gonna get tired of me,'" Preston said to the L.A. Times. "That was the fear; it's like, ‘It's gonna be too much.' And then it was, ‘No, I just have to show up and try to solve the scene. Each day, there's just more scenes.' And then also just giving myself permission to let the character evolve and not feel like I have to re-create something that I already did. It's a police procedural, so it is a drama with this circus dropped down into the middle of it, which is my character. That's fun too, because I'm able to live and breathe in it a little more. I have been able to do a lot more of a dramatic, poignant - just a deeper dive with her that was not what I was being hired to do in those other shows."

"Elsbeth" has been renewed for Season 2 with all of Season 1 available to stream on Paramount+.

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