“I’ve loved an opportunity to be on the air for all of those seasons because I keep refining the character and refining the performance.” – Christine Baranski on ‘The Good Fight’
Emmy and Tony Award-winning actress Christine Baranski has now portrayed Diane Lockhart for more than a decade between The Good Wife and its spinoff series The Good Fight. That has given Baranski an extraordinary opportunity to grow with the character over time. In an in-depth interview about The Good Fight with NPR‘s Terry Gross, Baranski spoke in detail about finding the right “voice” for her character — quite literally, in this sense.
Baranski’s answer stemmed from a question from Gross regarding whether Baranski finds herself speaking in a different voice for comedic roles than she does for dramatic roles. In response, Baranski said:
“I think I had to find the voice of Diane during my years of The Good Wife because I was – I had done so much comedy. And my real challenge with playing Diane was assuming that I was that powerful woman, you know, the senior partner in a law firm that she created, that she had a kind of authority and gravitas. And I needed not to work at it because people who are serious-minded and authoritative really don’t work at it. They just are that.
So I’ve learned to calibrate the sound and the tone and the manner of that character to be just much more understated as the years have gone by, which is why I’ve loved an opportunity to be on the air for all of those seasons because I keep refining the character and refining the performance. My comedic roles were always much more flamboyant and physical in nature, certainly my stage work. So, yes, I’ve – you know, I’ve loved the opportunity to vary my performance style and have people see another aspect of me.”
