The final episode of The Good Wife airs on May 8, and it’s been several weeks since series star Christine Baranski shot the final episode with her co-stars. She spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the end of the series she has spent the last seven years working on and what she plans to do next.
Baranski says that although production on the series has wrapped, she won’t feel like it’s over until she realizes she isn’t starting a new season like she has been for the past seven years. She explains, “By the time we’re done with 22 shows, everybody is ready for the season to be over because we’re all tired. Twenty-two is a lot, and then shooting what were the final episodes had a particular kind of dramatic intensity, but we would be ending now anyway. It’s not like a Broadway show where suddenly on Tuesday night you have nowhere to go because you’ve just been doing it. We definitely all want our hiatus and I think what will be shocking is come July when we always went back, we won’t be, and it was such a really stellar group of people top to bottom, just a wonderful production team, writing, the actors and the guest actors and just an incredible crew also. I will miss the family of this show profoundly.”
After finishing a large project like a seven year television series, Baranski has plenty of options on where to go next. Baranski was a Broadway mainstay during the 1980s and won both a Tony and a Drama Desk Award — and it sounds like she plans on heading back to the theater. Or is she? She says, “It always depends on the project but it goes without saying that at some point I’m going to want to do the theater again. That’s what I did for most of my career, and I bet a fabulous comedy in the theater would be a wonderful antidote to doing seven years of a network drama. But I have great faith. I go from one thing to another. I’d love to do a movie musical again. I’d love to sing again. There are so many great things being done on cable that don’t involve 22 episodes, but limited runs. Nowadays, you can bounce around as an actor in a most creative way, so I’m wide open, frankly.”
