There’s a lot of rumors going around that Kathy Bates is going to retire but nothing could be further from the truth. The two-time Emmy winning actress is stepping into the title role in CBS’ gender-flipped re-imagining of the legal drama Matlock, premiering tonight.
“I never really thought I’d be doing broadcast TV again,” Bates tells Parade in this exclusive interview. “When I first read it, before I got to the end of the script, I was going, ‘Oh, this is just another procedural, I don’t know if this is something that I’d be up for doing.’ And then, bang, all of a sudden, I saw what was underneath, and that really excited me.”
The original Matlock starred Andy Griffith in the title role of a successful Atlanta attorney. Bates will be playing Madeline “Matty” Matlock, who wheedles her way into a job at a prestigious New York City law firm by pulling the ageism card, and she considers it one of the most challenging roles she’s played to date, and she hopes to play it for years to come.
“As long as I’m physically able to,” says the 76-year-old. “I look at Betty White and I think, ‘Well, maybe. Maybe I could make it that far.’ I certainly love working on this show, and I love the complexity of the character. I love working with this cast, especially Jennie [Snyder Urman] because she’s such a brilliant writer, she hasn’t let us down once. So, yes, if all those systems are a go, if I am in good shape and the scripts are wonderful and all of that, which I anticipate they will be.”
The complexity of the character comes from a twist in the show that we won’t spoil here, but it means that Bates is playing two characters at once: the Matty Matlock she is in the office and then the woman she is at home.
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Bates admits that sometimes the transition from one to the other isn’t easy, but copious notes in her script help her to keep the characterizations separate.
“I have to shift gears, and the accent is different in my script,” she explains. “I write, ‘no accent’ or ‘accent,’ so that I can make sure that I’m doing what I’m supposed to do there. Also, her emotions, she can be much freer to express her emotions at home than she can be at the law firm, of course, and I think that’s a challenge for her to find a way to get herself out of these scrapes that happen that are unexpected. I love the challenge that I do get to play these two different women really.”
Bates says that she often turns to memories of her mother to find the key to playing Matty. She says the two women are more alike than her and Matty. But the one thing she does have in common with her TV character, and it’s a line that repeats through the series is: “Old women are invisible, no one sees us coming.”
“I do feel invisible,” Bates admits. “I think if I was not well known, I would be invisible.”
That said, she relates a very funny anecdote about Shelley Winters in the later stages of her career.
“She was asked to go and audition for a role, and she was told to take her photo and résumé, so she took a big carpet bag and she went and sat before the reviewer and she pulled one Oscar statuette out of her bag and she slammed it on the table and she said, ‘Here’s my photo.’ And then she pulled a second one out of the bag and she said, ‘Here’s my résumé,’ and slammed the second one on the table.”
Bates, however, has an advantage that Winters didn’t. She starred in several seasons of Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story, which did reach younger viewers. However, that was more of a costume drama, so that could explain why Bates says she went unnoticed when she first began working on Matlock on the Paramount lot and would pass the golf carts with visitors who had paid to tour the studio.
“I thought they’d recognize me immediately when I was on my golf cart sailing by to go someplace,” she says. “I couldn’t even get their attention, you know? I’d be waving and they’d look right at me, and nobody would see who I was, and it got so frustrating. And I thought, ‘Well, maybe when this damn thing comes out they’ll know who I am again.’”
Also during our chat, Bates compared her Matlock with the original, discussed the role ageism plays in the series, the commonalities between her and Matty, and second thoughts.
This show has been called a re-imagining of Matlock, but other than the name and the fact that it’s a legal drama, it seems so different to me. Do you find any commonalities maybe between Ben and Matty or is there something I’m missing?
Well, I think it’s even in Episode 3, she tries a case, and I think the behavior that I chose in that episode is closer to the previous Matlock, because of her style. I looked at Andy Griffith and he was very subtle in what he did, and Matty is much more complex than that. Also, I didn’t watch the show at the time, I wasn’t a TV watcher. I was working in New York in the theater, so at the time when television was on at night, I was performing, so I didn’t use the Andy Griffith Matlock as much of a template. His folksiness is what I tried to capture.
You were born in the South, so does that come naturally to you?
Yes, it does. There are a lot of different Southern accents, so it was a little tricky for Matty to use that folksiness that she has in the office when she’s working, but even at home, I think a little of her Southern accent comes through. How do I put this without giving anything away? She has grown up in the South, so there’s a little bit of truth in everything that she does about her own life.
There’s a twist to the story, does that mean that this is a one-season show? Or is there a way that Matty could stay with the firm? Does she fall in love with being part of the law again?
Well, the case is solved at the end, but no, Matty definitely has a life after this season. I think it will remain always a procedural, as it was in the show with Andy Griffith, but there will also be the continued development of the twist.
Photo: Sonja Flemming/CBS
What I loved about the premiere episode is that she comes into this law firm, this very ageist law firm, right? She has to cite law in order to get hired, but then she teaches these young kids a thing or two. Do you love that about it?
Yes, I do. In the scene, of course, with [guest star] Hal Williams, I love where she’s trying to understand exactly what he saw in the alley for the murder, and she realizes when he’s cooking his pot pie, he’s doing it from commercial break to commercial break. I think it’s very clever that the kids just don’t get it at all, don’t understand.
But in a deeper way, she doesn’t have an iPhone between her and the person that she’s talking to, you know? She’s one on one with people, in person, where she can see them in their environment and she picks up on their characteristics as a way for her to be able to talk to them and charm them, and I think a lot of that certainly is lost.
I had a friend who went to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, and the girls in front of him were really cutting up and making a lot of noise and he asked them to please be quiet. And the girl turned around and said, “Is this happening in the real world?” You know? Matty definitely lives in the real world.
She’s learning from them, too, like how fast they can research things on their phones, and she has a grandson who is teaching her about the internet for them to do research. So, is she also learning from them as well as being able to teach them?
Absolutely, and I think that goes along with all of the unexpected things that she finds there at the law firm. It’s one thing to think about and plan for something, as we all know, and then there’s no substitute for reality. Once you get in there you realize, “Oh, I didn’t think about this, this is a case about a real person. I can’t just be trying to figure out a password, I have to be dealing with real people and real law cases and life and death.” I think that comes as a shock to her, and realizing that, “Wait a minute. This is going to be a lot more complicated and a lot more lengthy process than I thought it was going to be.”
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This is allegedly a drama because it’s set in a legal office, but there’s a lot of humor in it. Did they craft that for you, especially because you’ve done such wonderful comedies? Is the humor put in there because you’re so good at it?
I think that that would have been there regardless. I think the humor is part of it. Even the music, when she’s in the office, it’s the old Matlock theme, and there’s supposed to be a lightness and a humor there in the office that’s not always there at home. Except I’m loving the relationship, which will be more developed as we go along, between her and her husband who’s played by Sam Anderson. It’s lovely. They’ve been married for 49 years and he’s very different than she is. He’s not such a type-A personality, so they really complement one another.
Photo: Brooke Palmer/CBS
Are there comparisons between Matty’s career and your career? She’s so sharp, and I think that in your career, you’ve played these wonderful characters. Do you see any commonalities?
Commonalities? You know, that’s a really interesting question, I’ve not thought of it that way. Not in my everyday life, but I go back in my memories, and I think about my mother a lot, and I feel more like my mother would have been Matty. She was really smart, and she wanted to be a lawyer, but because she was born in 1907, and at that time women did not do things like that, at least in her experience. She grew up in a little town in the South, so she didn’t have that background. I think she was very frustrated because she was really sharp as a tack, even when she got older, and I see that in Matty more than myself. I mean, I’m not dull, I have a gallows sense of humor, sort of like Matty I guess, so I have a little bit of commonality. The women in my family, we all have that gallows sense of humor, very sharp wit, so I see that in Matty.
And I guess there is the commonality that I have two different lives. People look at me, I would imagine, as being like my characters, but in real life I don’t think I am that way. I don’t go out as much. I guess it’s just easy to say I’m more of a homebody. I’m not married like Matty is, I don’t share that commonality with her, and I’ve really had to dig into my memories and my imagination to create her more than using my own life.
That’s always been true, I think, in my work. I use my life experience, as all actors do in our imagination, to try to create characters. And I don’t know if I’d have the guts to do what she’s doing, that’s for damn sure. There’s no commonality there. Although I have to say, as I’m nearing the end of my life, and I’d ask you the same question, are there times when you feel like the Peggy Lee song, “Is That All There Is?”
Or I’ll meet with different people, I’ve been very involved with the Lymphatic Education & Research Network, and I meet all these really interesting people that have done medicine and law and I think, “Oh gee, if I’d known when I was younger that that was a possibility, would I have taken that track?”
There’s that wonderful series out now called Dark Matter where you can have an infinite number of choices to create a life for yourself, and I must say that I’ve had some regrets recently in these last few years when I’ve met these people who live “real lives” that are helping real people in the real world. And feeling, “Wow, could I have done that? Could I have been a lawyer in real life?” Well, you get the point.
Photo by Frazer Harrison/WireImage
Right, the shoulda, woulda, couldas.
Yeah, the shoulda, coulda, wouldas, what would my life have been? Well, you can’t go back, you can’t change it, but you think, “Gosh, did I make the right choice?” I created a life where my whole goal is to pretend to be other people and to be able to play them as fully as possible so that I can fool the eye but reach the heart. That’s what I longed to do when I was young, and I kept following it and following it, and it’s what I love.
I hate to call it an addiction but even when I got this part, at first I thought, “Oh, I don’t know.” And then I hung up the phone and I was waiting, and waiting, and waiting for the script and I thought, “You know, it’s never going to change for me, I’m always going to be excited to pick up the next script, to see what’s the challenge? Is this something I can do?” This is one of the most challenging roles I’ve ever played, and I fret over it, I fuss over it, it’s a tremendous amount of work, and I wonder every day if I’ve risen to the challenge, if I’ve done everything I can. Anyway, I guess I’ve said it all.
Matlock premieres tonight at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
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