Julianna Margulies‘ ill-fated Good Fight guest stint was a hot topic at the Television Critics Assoc. summer press tour, with CBS All Access’ top exec weighing in on the headline-making kerfuffle for the first time.
Quick refresher: The Good Wife star was thisclose to reprising her Emmy-winning role of Alicia Florrick on spinoff series The Good Fight, but the deal fell apart because “CBS refused to pay my [ask],” Margulies recently told our sister site Deadline, noting that CBS wanted to pay her a guest-star rate vs. her regular fee. “I’m not a guest star; I started the whole thing with The Good Wife. I wanted to be paid my worth and stand up for equal pay.
“If Jon Hamm came back for a Mad Men spinoff or Kiefer Sutherland wanted to do a 24 spinoff,” Margulies added, “they would be paid.”
On Thursday, Julie McNamara, CBS All Access’ EVP Original Content, said of the dispute: “We love Julianna and there’s a long, great history [with her]. We did want to bring her to guest on The Good Fight. There was a different [financial] expectation of what that meant, and it didn’t work out… It was just a deal that didn’t work out. I won’t go into the financial specifics of that.” (McNamara also teased that CBS All Access has “another project in development” with Margulies, but the exec declined to offer any specifics.)
At TCA last February, Good Wife and Good Fight co-creator Robert King revealed under what circumstances Alicia might have appeared. “We thought maybe about making a big episode where she would be at the resistance, [and] Diane and her face each other,” King told reporters. “But that would be the end of the story. It felt like an asterisk.”
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