Christine Baranski is a professional. She is, needless to say, a professional actor of the stage and screen, with some professional singing and dancing to round out her resume, and an Emmy and a Tony on her mantle. But in many ways, Baranski is also a professional at the sheer act of being. She seems to have most of the difficult stuff figured out, to have carefully honed a graceful existence. She’s decidedly earned her status as a legend, even if the designation makes her laugh.
Walking into New York City’s tony Lexington Club, with its rich leather booths and dark wood bathed in amber lighting, I think, “Of course this is where we’re meeting.” It has a sort of class that’s just a bit offbeat, much like my dining partner. There’s an excitement to meeting someone whose work you’ve loved, but a touch of anxiety too. (Baranski is perched alongside such luminaries as Martha Stewart and Celine Dion on the list I created for Keep It, the podcast I cohost, of my favorite white women.) You want them to be who you hope they are, but that can lead to disappointment. You want them to surprise you, to reveal something new, but that comes with its own risks. Having watched Baranski for years onscreen as the fabulous birth mother to Robin Williams’ son in Birdcage, a fabulous divorcee in Cybil, a fabulous serial-divorcee in the Mamma Mia movies, and a fabulous (are you sensing a pattern?) lawyer in the Good Wife, her reputation looms heavily in my mind.
As we sit, Baranski blends seamlessly into the Upper East Side haunt. (Though, in fact, she lives in Connecticut.) The waiters greet her with a warm familiarity. She looks both elegant and at ease in a herringbone blazer and white blouse. She wears a pair of thick-rimmed reading glasses that may have begun as Christine Baranski’s trademark accessory, but now belong to Diane Lockhart, the powerhouse lawyer she played on The Good Wife and now plays on her own spinoff, The Good Fight. Diane is arguably the most famous—and, at nine seasons over two series, the longest-running—role of her career. The two women share the precise diction that one might have assumed was a character choice, the perfectly tousled blonde bob, the wry poise. They speak in measured tones and insert thoughtful pauses before answering a question. There are moments when I feel like I’m sitting across from Diane herself. But then Baranski orders rosé. (Diane prefers whiskey.) Or she digs into the fresh popovers that arrive at our table and advises me to get them while they’re hot. Or she calculates out loud the time it will take to make it home in time to tell bedtime stories to her grandchildren.
As our meal goes on, I consider that the distance between the two women is wider than I realized in part because we don’t really know Baranski all that well. She’s an actor who places her profession first. She speaks with admiration and a bit of envy of Old Hollywood icons like Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, and enduring screen vets like Maggie Smith, not only for their bodies of work but because they were allowed, despite their strong personas, to be actors foremost.
She mentions her two daughters often and drops bits of advice she’s given them throughout the years—which I immediately pick up for myself. I’m around their age, and who doesn’t want to pretend for a minute that Christine Baranski is their mother, guiding them through life? “One big piece of advice I gave my daughters,” she says, “is don’t give yourself away cheap. Know your worth.”
In those moments, the elusive aura that she’s spun over nearly forty years as an actress disperses, and I’m struck by how familiar it feels to sit and talk and dig into fresh-baked popovers with Baranski. She’s a woman with nothing to hide—but one who knows how to show you just enough. “It’s nice to be somewhat mysterious,” she says. She’s a professional at it.
How do you feel about being considered a legend?
Well, I have a great sense of humor about it in that it must mean I’ve been around a long time. But, you know, my idea of a legend is from back in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, when we had serious movie stars. So I take it with a grain salt. Plus I’m still working!
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You started in the theater. Did you ever see beyond it? Did you imagine a career in film or TV?
When I came to Julliard in 1970, my dream was to be a theater actress. I never imagined myself as a film actress. That world seemed very far away and I didn’t see myself up on the big screen. I was really quite shy because I had chronically bad skin. Back then you had to have a certain kind of beauty. I really didn’t go to Hollywood until I was in my forties.
They kept trying to get me to do sitcoms before then, but by my early thirties, I’d gotten married [to the late actor Matthew Cowles] and started having children, and I did not want to raise them in Los Angeles. But as you move on in your career and you have a family, your paycheck becomes an issue. The question was: “How much theater could I do that would be enough to pay the bills?” Plus it was sort of time for me to become more well known, in the way that television can suddenly make you ubiquitous. And that’s exactly what happened when I did Cybill on CBS. It was a smart move but, you know, most actresses don’t wait until their forties to go to Hollywood.
What was it that drew you to Cybill? What about the show made you ready to take a job in TV?
I was so ambivalent about it. I didn’t want to read for the network, and honestly the head of the network at that time really wasn’t interested in me either. He actually said in a meeting, “Nobody’s interested in Christine Baranski.” But the pilot was written by Chuck Lorre, and I could sense off the page that there was really something there. And after 13 weeks, I won an Emmy for that role, so….
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[Laughs.]
That role turned my career around. I had a solid reputation as a theater actress, I had won an Obie and several Tonys, and people in New York knew me, but back in the ’80s, television comedy was a big thing. So I went out and did it, and I left my family with my late husband and our nanny, who is still in our life now, and I just commuted. I made it work for the three-and-a-half years that I did Cybill. And then Mike Nichols asked me to be in The Birdcage, Warren Beatty asked me to be in Bullworth, and then I did How the Grinch Stole Christmas, I did Bowfinger. It opened up my film career. It’s a career that has just kept developing—and then I was in my mid-fifties when I got The Good Wife. And this is my tenth year of playing Diane Lockhart. I’m still in front of a camera, so I’ve kind of beaten the odds.
A lot of the best-known roles you’ve played are in projects with women at the center, particularly The Good Fight and The Good Wife. Is that something you look for?
Nope. I adore acting with men and women. But what I love about Diane—and I worked with [co-creators Robert and Michelle King] on this—is that we don’t fall into the trap of making her “the bitch boss.” She could be tough, especially with her female colleagues, but she could also be a mentor. We didn’t want Diane to be a stereotype—a woman of a certain age, who didn’t have a personal life, who was a ball breaker. Diane doesn’t make her own age an issue. You never, when you’re watching the show, see the writers address her getting older. She’s well dressed, she looks great, she’s got a sense of humor, she’s still healthy, she has this relationship. And I like that.
I’m probably biased since I’m a TV writer, but in interviews you often talk about the writing on the shows you’re on. It seems like you have a great respect for the work the writers are doing.
Well, I come from the theater and I’ve played roles written by great playwrights. And when I chose to do The Good Wife, I remember my manger saying, “You may want to look at this pilot, because it’s one really well-written script.” And my God, it was. So, I trusted the Kings when The Good Wife ended. They talked about a spinoff, and nothing really materialized for a long time. In that time, I turned down another job that was a firm offer on an established show in favor of going into the unknown with the Kings.
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Why do you think Diane Lockhart has resonated so much with viewers? Spinoffs don’t always work, yet viewers followed Diane into The Good Fight, and she’s become a role model even more than before.
Isn’t it funny, though? We spin off The Good Wife, and it was supposed to be about life in the era of a Hilary Clinton presidency—and while we’re shooting the pilot, well, that didn’t happen. And it became life during the Trump presidency. And as we know, there was a strong response from women. I mean, the day after the inauguration, women were marching in force against this president, organizing and saying, We’re going to claim our power now. So, curiously, Diane has always been that woman in a room with the men, she’s always been a grownup, she’s always been sane and graceful, but now her time has come.
It was interesting in season two to watch Diane unravel a little as a result of the tumultuousness of the world. I think that’s something we can all relate to. Did you feel that sort of unraveling at any point in the past two years?
I felt very much like Diane last year. I watched tons of cable news. In season three, [you’ll see] the Diane character very much being impacted by Donald Trump. In fact, this season her marriage will be impacted by it.
What’s a character role that you haven’t played yet that you would like to play?
I haven’t played any queens!
That does feel like an oversight.
I think it’s in my future because, you know, queens can last a long time.
In Hollywood right now there’s been a lot of talk about how much things are moving forward and changing. You have #MeToo and #TimesUp….
Don’t forget my former boss, Leslie Moonves. I was very fond of Leslie, and I had a long association with him. But this is a particularly messy moment in history. And it’ll be messy for a long time. I think the election of Donald Trump kicked up so much dust, and women began to really react. While he was campaigning for president, we heard him talking about grabbing women. You could see for yourself the level of misogyny and lack of respect. And yet he became president. I think it all contributed to #MeToo, to women pushing back. So, in a way, I would like to think that if there is anything positive about his presidency, it’s that the culture has been so profoundly shaken up. I think it was necessary.
And it has been really ugly to look at. And as hard as it is now for men and women to talk to each other, we have to get this toxicity out. And if people can watch my show, and it can help them work through all that, then that’s a great thing. I’m so relieved that I’m not on a show that’s just entertaining people with dumb jokes.
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Do you feel that, because of the shakeup in Hollywood, you have the power to say: maybe the person in charge of my company is not someone who should be in charge? And do you feel like you have the leverage to let your feelings be known?
You just cannot take down people’s reputations based on emotion. It’s got to be a serious grievance. The downside of all this is people using [the movement] as a reason to address their own sense of victimization. You have to be careful how you use power. But that said, the vigilance now is a really good thing. As is letting it be known that behavior that was tolerated in the past will no longer be tolerated.
Do you recall any incidents of behavior that you had to put up with, that would not fly today?
I did not have any incidents of being forced or coerced, but did men make passes at me? Yeah. It was the age. It was the ’70s and the ’80s. But we were all sort of “in it together” in the sense that we celebrated a kind of sexual liberation. We were just coming off of the ’60s, for god’s sake. It was all around us—you know, open up and liberate yourself! I went to Catholic girls’ school. I was a virgin when I came to Julliard, and I was embarrassed that I had no sexual experience, you know? I didn’t really see men as predators at the time—they were “bold and unabashed.” I will say this: I think that so much of the culture encouraged that behavior. I think it gave men license to behave badly, but I was not a serious victim of it.
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Is there a role that at the time you were worried about being able to pull off that you then did?
I remember Mike Nichols casting me in a Tom Stoppard play called The Real Thing in 1984. It was to play across Jeremy Irons as his wife. And [the character] was a fiercely witty woman. But it was Tom Stoppard and Mike Nichols and Glenn Close, and I would go on the train back home to Connecticut thinking, Oh my god, I’m just really not smart enough. I’m not English. I’m not witty. I like to think that I won a Tony Award for that because I had to learn to act like I was smart. I will never be as smart as Tom Stoppard or any of the characters he writes. Looking back, I think, Well, okay, so I had to rely on my sense of how to fake it. I’m just going to act the role.
But I remember many times thinking one of two things: I’m either not smart enough, or that I’m not beautiful enough. I’d always thought I was, you know, attractive enough. In school they called me “cute.” Nobody said “beautiful.” I had bad skin and I was insecure when I came to Julliard. I was always fighting my skin. It took until my early thirties, after I had children, for my skin to clear up. Until then, I was always self-conscious. In a way it was good, because I can completely empathize with people who had issues about their looks. Now I’m so happy to be on the other side of my career, where it’s like, I look pretty good for my age!
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There’s a great clip in which you were told that you have BDE—“Big Dick Energy”—and you were asked what you think it means. Have you learned what it is since?
I was very vague about it, but then I was almost choosing to be vague about it, because the microphone was put in my face at the Mama Mia! premiere and I had never heard of it, had no clue. And then an actress friend of mine emailed me weeks later to say, “You’re my hero. That was a genius response.” And I don’t even remember what I said! Whatever it is, it amuses me. I’d rather it remain mysterious, but just between us…what is it again?
Your friend Cher is a prolific Tweeter. Have you ever been tempted to dip your toe into social media?
No. Maybe I’m missing out. But I never had Facebook, and now I’m grateful that I didn’t. I don’t wish to support that company. We live in an age where we’re just all giving ourselves away. And we don’t know the consequences of that yet. Once you give yourself away, or you give your information away, or expose your personal life, or even your thoughts, you can’t put it back in a box. What you say can be turned against you. I think the culture’s too loud now. I think everybody’s yap-yap-yapping and no one’s being heard. And hyperbole isn’t working because now everybody’s talking with exclamation points. I would like to see more thoughtful dialogue and more subtlety of expression. I’m not gonna enter the fray. And I’m an actress, so I want people to believe that I’m the character I’m playing. I don’t want a Christine Baranski brand. I’m still protective of my life—it’s nice to be somewhat mysterious. I don’t need to write a book about, This is why I was successful and, by the way, this is my exercise regime….
You’re not going give us your 10-point skincare regimen?
I mean, it’s pretty basic—but no. We know too much about each other. We’re all overexposed. I can only say this: I just try to keep up with my emails. Otherwise, I try to have a great family life, a great personal life, and do my work well. I just don’t want to live on my phone or in front of a computer.
What’s a piece of advice that you wish you had gotten earlier in your career?
Don’t feel you have to keep apologizing. I think women do that so much: Oh, I’m sorry. Did I get in your way? I’m so sorry. I would love to just speak in declarative sentences and not qualify my opinions. I’m still working on it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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