“The Good Wife” star Julianna Margulies almost made a visit to the CBS All Access spinoff “The Good Fight” this season — but the price wasn’t right.
The actress was “really excited about the idea” of reprising her Emmy-winning role of Alicia Florrick, “but CBS refused to pay my [ask],” Margulies told Deadline while promoting her Nat Geo miniseries “The Hot Zone” at The Contenders Emmys event on Sunday.
“The showrunners had found a nice way to reintroduce my character, a story that was to span three episodes” during the current third season, Margulies shared. Alas, when she asked for her regular fee — and no more, she noted to Deadline — Margulies was offered a “Good Fight” guest-star rate.
“I’m not a guest star; I started the whole thing with ‘The Good Wife,’” Margulies explained. “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, they would be paid.”
At the Television Critics Association press tour in 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.”