’Matlock’s Skye P. Marshall on the Finale Twists and What’s to Come in Season 2
[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for Matlock.]
Summary
- In the finale of the CBS series ‘Matlock,’ the truth about the Wellbrex documents was finally revealed, which will likely lead to consequences in Season 2.
- The first season kept the audience guessing with twists and turns, inducing suspense and anxiety, until the final moments.
- For Olympia, played by Skye P. Marshall, personal challenges and professional dilemmas are sure to lead to intriguing plot developments in the second season.
From showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman (Jane the Virgin), the CBS series Matlock finally provided Madeleine Matlock (Kathy Bates) with the answers she’s been looking for when it comes to what happened to the Wellbrexa documents. Matty has been working with her partners in crime, husband Edwin (Sam Anderson) and grandson Alfie (Aaron D. Harris), and deceiving the attorneys at Jacobson Moore because she wants to hold the guilty parties responsible for the death of her daughter. But for someone like Olympia (Skye P. Marshall), who has just made partner and whose ex-husband (Jason Ritter) and father-in-law Senior (Beau Bridges) were the ones responsible, it will be interesting to see how that will play out.
After screening the two-part season finale, Collider got the opportunity to chat one-on-one with Marshall about the hit series. During the interview, she talked about the building anxiety of the first season as Matty searched for the truth, the feedback she hears from fans, the collateral damage Matty has caused around her, how challenging it is for Olympia to know where not to cross the line, the much-needed moments of levity, when she found out that Olympia wasn’t actually responsible for the Wellbrexa deceit, that safety deposit box moment, when she might find out what comes next in Season 2, and whether Olympia should just start her own law firm.
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Collider: I love how much more we know now, after the finale, but there are still questions I need answered.
SKYE P. MARSHALL: I love that! I love the anxiety that our show induces with our fans. The audience is eating it up. Especially living in New York City, I can’t hide. It’s been quite the treat for people who watch the show, to come up to me and give me their theory on who hid the Wellbrexa docs. It was fascinating because it was an equal amount of people saying Julian and people saying Olympia.
Did anybody have a totally crazy theory?
MARSHALL: I saw an audience member leave a comment on our Matlock Instagram, where I was like, “Oh, my God, this kid is piecing some things together.” (Showrunner) Jennie Snyder Urman is so incredible with the writing and her writing team, the way that they take you in a loop, and then at the end of the episode, you see flashbacks and go, “Oh, I remember when that happened, and I remember when that happened, and that all makes sense. Oh, my goodness, she knew this whole time?” There have been fans that have not allowed the little hints to sneak by. They’ve been collecting every little detail to piece together their theories, but I’ve only seen one person who has gotten really close to figuring it out, out of 13 million average viewers.
Even if You Love to Watch Kathy Bates, Madeleine Matlock Is a Liar
“I love that it really challenges the audience.”
Even toward the end of the finale, it was still easy to waver back and forth.
MARSHALL: It was like, “Oh, my gosh, stop you guys. I keep getting emotionally invested in one plot, and then you twist me into another direction.” That’s a huge fraction of what makes Matlock such a massive success. You can have Kathy Bates all you want, and you can put us on the number one primetime channel, but at the end of the day, what are we saying? How are we portraying these characters? How is the editor cutting it? Does the music or not? How did they transition from one scene to the next? And so, this is a masterpiece of an incredible collaborative, creative experiment and we all just blindly trusted each other to raise the stakes in every scene. A lot of people who watch the show are like, “Oh, my God, I barely breathe until a commercial break.” It was so important to all of us to keep the energy going. We’re coming from somewhere and we’re going somewhere.
The rabbit hole that Matty Matlock has found herself traveling through, the audience forgets that while they’re so focused on who hid the Wellbrexa documents that are responsible for the opioid epidemic, they forget that Madeline Matlock is a con artist and Madeline Matlock is a liar. What does that make you, as the audience member rooting for her? Her sister Bitsy called her out and said, “How are you not addicted? Is this something that you have to lie to people to do? Does it keep you up at night? Does it negatively impact your family?” Alfie is in school and Edwin just wants to go back home to Georgia. You start to realize that while you’ve been on this mission with Madeline Matlock, there’s collateral damage that can happen to some of your favorite characters that you’ve now fallen in love with. Having that reversal take place towards the end of the season, I love that it really challenges the audience to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong in these scenarios, and who you can trust.
Matty is doing all these really manipulative things behind everybody’s back.
MARSHALL: Yeah, like not giving Sarah that opportunity to try in court, which she clearly could have done. The way that she manipulated that situation because she was sneaking in Billy’s desk crushed Sarah. But because the audience is Team Matlock, you brush over all the damage that she’s creating and how it can deeply impact her colleagues. The revelation of that is what allows people to really feel emotional about the direction of Matlock going into Season 2.
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Olympia essentially locks Matty in a room, which under most circumstances, you’d have a problem with.
MARSHALL: When I first saw that, I just wanted one opportunity to get a press photo of me holding a sledgehammer next to Kathy’s feet, to reference [Misery]. I was like, “Come on, guys, let me just get one PR photo of us locked in this room and give me a sledgehammer. I’ll even hold it over my shoulder.”
Did they let you do it?
MARSHALL: Hell no! Honestly, I didn’t even take it all the way up the ladder. Maybe in Season 2, I’ll fight for it. That would have been such a perfect opportunity for me to jump on the fanfare of Misery. I think it could have been a cool press photo after it aired.
‘Matlock’s Skye P. Marshall Says That Olympia Just Wants to Do Good but Is Constantly Tested
“It’s exhausting being Olympia.”
I just thought it was funny that I wasn’t mad at Olympia for doing that, even though we probably should be mad at someone for locking another person in a room.
MARSHALL: I couldn’t believe it when I read the script. I was like, “Oh, my goodness, Olympia is unhinged.” But I can also see how she got there. When you look back at all the different times that, while Olympia has been fighting to do good for people, she has been betrayed consistently, whether it be from Julian, or Senior doing dirty work with the case of the mold and the woman who died and him doing the Texas two-step on her, or Elijah making it personal because their breakup and her client were deeply, negatively impacted by that, or Julian and Shae, or even Sarah going behind her back and breaking the firm’s rules, knowing that she’s a representation of her and that she’ll have to fix it, it’s exhausting being Olympia. She wants to do good and be good, but she’s surrounded by a lot of people that are very self-centered and self-absorbed.
Even the way they wrote Olympia to be a class act when it came to Shae, I wanted a scene where I snatch the skin off of her face, and they were like, “But that’s Skye. That’s not Olympia.” And I was like, “I know! But this kind of betrayal, at least give me a soap opera slap.” And they were like, “No, we will not.” And I loved that. I was able to step back and remind myself that Olympia will always put the client first, and she will put her personal feelings and relationships to the side because she is spending her time and her quality expertise on clients that cannot afford her. She’ll be able to make it rain from the class-action money that she brings into the firm, but this is her way of doing good work. This is her living on purpose, and this is her purposefully doing something that’s bigger than just herself in the firm.
To find someone like Matlock, who comes in and finds a crack in the castle wall, it allows her to be vulnerable in her glass office where she knows she’s constantly being watched, and there’s one above that you just can’t see but that she’s constantly in need of breaking. She has that ally come into the viper’s nest, as we called it, just to turn around and do that, and not really understand the severity of her actions and how that impacted her at home and with her family and her insecurities and her doubt and her fears. It’s going to be a challenge for Olympia to understand why Matlock is the way she is, rather than easily just judging her. That’s something that you only offer to a loved one. And so, when I saw that she was trying to understand, I realized it wasn’t just to prove that Matlock was wrong in her accusations, but I also believe it was a sign of love as well.
The only one not up to shenanigans in this office is Barry Manilow, the dog.
MARSHALL: That’s the only innocent one in this whole show. Absolutely. Poor Barry Manilow. Everybody is up to something, and I believe that is what is so engaging and what has allowed our audience to be so broad. My husband and I are constantly walking around the streets of New York, where I’m not in a car and we get such a variety of fans that come up to me. We’re always saying, “Look at our demographic.” There are different ages, different races, different sexual identities. It’s a melting pot. A construction worker in a hard hat was like, “Hey, aren’t you Olympia from Matlock?” And I was like, “What?!” It was just so funny. And that was after leaving an art gallery where all these artsy fartsy people were like, “Absolutely love you on Matlock.” From the gallery owner to the construction worker, they all are so excited about where the story is going. I have no idea what Olympia is going to decide after the end of the finale. No idea.
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This series also has moments of levity, like the exchange between Olympia and Sarah and her missing tooth.
MARSHALL: Oh, my God, that was so hilarious. That is Leah’s real missing tooth. She offered that up as an idea. That’s what I mean when I say our writers’ room and our showrunner are so collaborative. If it makes sense, they can make it work. But nobody knew until we were all at lunch and she just popped her tooth out. I was like, “I’m sorry, what?! Open your mouth.” That just stuck with folks. It took multiple takes for us to pull that off because we just kept breaking character. It was so hard for me to not bust out laughing when she did that.
It also really shows how far their relationship has come from where it was when the series started.
MARSHALL: The thing I’ve learned is that the ones that drive you crazy the most tend to be your biggest teachers. Someone said that to me a long time ago when it came to relationships. Just like school, you’re not going to like all your teachers, but your butt is going to learn something. And I believe that Sarah has taught Olympia grace and patience.
The Cast of ‘Matlock’ Didn’t Want Answers Before They Needed to Have Them
“It’s never fun to see an actor twist their mustache.”
When did you find out with absolute certainty that Olympia was not responsible?
MARSHALL: When we got the script, which we get days before production. None of us wanted to know. It’s never fun to see an actor twist their mustache behind their dialogue. We didn’t want to anticipate anything. We didn’t even want our subconscious mind to try to act out any kind of villain demeanor or be the good girl or the good guy. We just wanted to do our jobs and fight for our clients, while at the same time trying to process all of these personal ups and downs that we are experiencing outside of the Jacobson Moore walls. When we’re filming, we’re not in Madeline Kingston’s house, figuring out and trying to solve this problem. I glaze over it. I barely read her scenes. And so, I forgot, after a while, what her mission was. For me, I was doing my job with my clients, trying to process a very complex divorce, while figuring out my friendship with Matlock and being a mentor to Sarah and Billy. When I read that script and she stopped off that bus, I was like, “Oh, my gosh!”
And Olympia works so hard to prove that it can’t be Julian that it made that moment she opens the safety deposit box that much more emotional.
MARSHALL: I was so emotionally, physically and mentally invested in Matlock. I was working insane hours, memorizing an overwhelming amount of dialogue that I was happy to embrace because it challenged me. I reached my highest potential that I currently have as talent. My cast and this level of writing has allowed me to step up to my highest potential right now. I know that I can still grow, but right now, this is the best I’ve been for myself, and I’m so proud of that. It took a lot out of me to deliver that. By the time I got to that safety deposit box, something that we had been waiting for, for so long, every take that they shot, I either was crying or held back tears because it was a scene where I never knew what the stakes would be. I wasn’t prepared for 13 million plus people to throw tomatoes at me in the street. I was like, “Please don’t let it be me. Please don’t let it be me. Please don’t let it be me. Please God, please. I want to be able to go to Trader Joe’s without being cornered.” Those kids are my kids now. With the stakes of it all, I had been so submerged in the filming and the character that I deeply felt everything. And I could tell so did Jason [Ritter] and so did Kathy. It’s right when those worlds get blurred. You’re literally at work, and then you go home and go to sleep. For me, it becomes my whole world and I feel exactly what my character is feeling. It takes a few weeks to shake that off when you’re done with production. By the end of filming those last three episodes, I was not acting anymore. All I had to do was make sure I memorized my lines and that I was prepared. I had all the feelings on the surface, and I was ready to just rip.
Do you feel like if you hadn’t gotten that definite answer by the end of this season that you knew Olympia well enough to know that she wasn’t involved?
MARSHALL: Honestly, no, because of that scene when we were at the bar drinking and I got to share what it was like working with Big Pharma early on in my career and knowing how high the stakes were and that I had different challenges that I would have to overcome than my husband Julian. I wasn’t against those challenges. I invited them because I wasn’t scared to get dirt under my nails. I was raised by a Marine and I was designed to win. I can think back to my early 20s when I was in the military, and I can think back to my teens, and there was some blur. There were some blurred moments. I remember cheating on a couple of tests in school, for sure. It doesn’t impact my character today because I’m a completely different person and a different woman. But I knew that, at that time, I needed to excel, and I didn’t have the tools, and I was a teenager. Or having to rely on my colleagues in the military because I mentally was having issues with getting through the beginning of the Iraqi Freedom War. I would have to get people from my job to step in for me and pick up my slack.
When I think back now, I personally had very high-stakes situations that were nowhere near being involved and hiding documents that could have kept opioids off the market, but I can see how, like Matlock says, if you keep telling yourself the same story for so long, it becomes real. And so, I genuinely did not know, and I would have understood the why. I would have understood why Olympia was fighting so hard for underprivileged people who cannot afford her. It would have made sense as to how she was processing that shame and that guilt, by doing pro bono work and trying to fix that pain and that trauma. Thank goodness it did not happen that way, but I wouldn’t have been shocked. I would have been frightened for Olympia. Being confronted by something that you hide in your subconscious mind and that you’ve made right with yourself, with the outcome that we all know opioids has had on the world, she more likely would quit her job. I don’t think she would still be able to go into the office, day-to-day. And so, what happens with Julian and his character, I’m still unclear. They don’t tell us anything. I’m excited, like everybody else, to see what is going to happen next. How can he still call himself an attorney, and what is Olympia going to do about that?
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Can Matty and Olympia ever come back from this?
Have they told you when they’re going to tell you what comes next? Do you have a date on a calendar for when you’re supposed to get the first script?
MARSHALL: I put a few AirTags in Jennie Snyder Urman’s car. No. Our writers are back in the office. I’m going to breach the security somehow, maybe as a DoorDasher, and just hover outside the door to see if I can see a drawing board or something. They keep it Matlocked. We’re probably not going to find out until a week before our first table read.
Do they give you a general arc for the season, or is it really just script by script?
MARSHALL: We have table reads for each episode, but as far as that overarching mystery, if you’re not in Madeline Kingston’s house, then you’re not going to know what she’s up to. It’s more like, “Here’s your case and here’s what you have going on.” At the beginning of Season 1, because it was our first season and we had to collaborate on our character’s backstory, they said, “Here is this person and the world that they came from. What are your thoughts?” And we were able to share our thoughts on the creative process. I really loved that. Jennie, our showrunner, is very collaborative. She has such a dynamic ability to surround herself with unique and eclectic individuals that give her well-informed ideas as to how someone from a certain culture or a certain generation might react or respond.
I love the way they write Olympia because it’s so true to how I would react and respond, and that always makes me smile and laugh when I see it. It’s not about just making the lawyer Black. They write for a Black woman who happens to be a lawyer, and that was very important to me. They were open to any little delicious slogans or sayings or mannerisms that I, myself, am used to or accustomed to. They’re open to it, the same way you see Kathy Bates saying the younger generation’s slang, or the fact that Leah Lewis, who plays Sarah, got to sing because she is an incredible singer in real life. We’re able to share our talents, our gifts, and our special skills, in case they can find places to plant it in the storyline, so that we can continue to shine outside of what they have already magically created, which is enough. We’re just adding a little extra secret sauce.
Even with my Telfar bag, I wear a different color to match every suit. That was important to me because it’s a Black designer. I remember when I saw Beyoncé wear the bag and everybody in my community and culture went nuts and it was sold out forever. I challenged our costume designer to get a Telfar bag to match every suit because, for me, that was giving a little wink to the culture, and they did. They found over 12 of those bags in different colors. And while a lot of audience members may not catch it or see it, there are a lot of Black people that do. That adds to the character of Olympia, that she doesn’t forget where she came from. She doesn’t need a $5,000 bag to prove that she’s worth $1,000 an hour.
’Matlock’s Skye P. Marshall Doesn’t Want to Just Let People Get Away With What Was Revealed in the Finale
“I don’t think Olympia appreciates that this happened on her turf.”
Do you feel like, at this point, the best thing Olympia could do is just start her own firm, far away from Senior and from Julian?
MARSHALL: I know, right? I would highly suggest that. It would just be extremely challenging. She just got to her ultimate goal of partner, and to start over at another firm, she would have to earn her stripes. That’s a challenge. She has so many resources already at Jacobson Moore. It’s like a lot of actors that I know, who are incredible, phenomenal performers, but they’re stuck at these big agencies that aren’t doing anything for them, but they use the name to get into rooms and to get in the conversations. But to start over at another agency, that’s scary. That’s something that would possibly happen in, cross my fingers, a Season 3. She still has some gutting to do in Jacobson Moore. I don’t think Olympia appreciates that this happened on her turf, nor is she going to let these people get away with it. Who hid the document is just the crust. There are layers to this cake. I don’t believe that she’s just going to walk away without holding more people accountable. This isn’t going to just fall on her ex-husband because she still loves him and she knows that her father-in-law, played by Beau Bridges, had a lot of influence on that decision. This doesn’t all weigh on Julian.
Matlock airs on CBS and is available to stream on Paramount+. Check out the trailer:
