Spoilers for The Good Fight season six, episode four, “The End of Eli Gold.â€
“You’ve never heard me swear before?†Eli Gold says when he suddenly appears in the second episode of this season of The Good Fight after years of only saying dialogue safe for CBS broadcast on The Good Wife. “Aren’t you in for a treat!†Then Eli launches into a tirade of “motherfucker,†“shit,†and more, which of course delighted Alan Cumming, though he felt it was a pity that some of Eli’s more evocative language was left on the cutting-room floor. “I called someone a ‘taint lick,’ which didn’t make it,†Cumming told Vulture over the phone. “But that’s showbiz.â€
On the series, Gold comes back into the life of his daughter, Marissa, played by Sarah Steele, and enlists her to help defend him in a case alleging his involvement in breaking into Mark Burnett’s offices to obtain The Apprentice outtakes. In his big send-off episode, “The End of Eli Gold,†Eli is also the target of a sudden anti-Semitic attack at a fundraiser, though the assailant misses and kills Frank Landau (Mike Pniewski), a member of the DNC involved in that case, instead. Suddenly Eli, the ultimate easy-breezy insider, is thrown off balance as the ever-looming threat of civil unrest outside the Good Fight’s offices grows all the more real.
The episode ends with a quiet moment between Eli and Marissa after she gets him off the hook in his case and before he drives away in a motorcade back to Washington, D.C. But the end of Eli Gold was originally even more bleak, and Cumming came back to the series expecting the writers to fully kill him off — which delighted him — until they changed course. He’s mostly made peace with having a “Jackie O moment†instead. That’s showbiz!
The first word you say on The Good Fight is “motherfucker.†It must have been nice to actually say “fuck†as Eli.
It was so great. One of the good things about The Good Fight is seeing the Kings be unleashed from the confines of network TV. I thought it was brilliant to just get it out of the way, and there was actually more swearing. There was a lot of “Suck my dick†as well, which didn’t make it.
When the Kings approached you with the idea of Eli coming back, how did they pitch the arc to you?
This had been a long time coming. There had been a lot of negotiations about money and blah, blah, blah and me feeling it’s important to understand your worth and expect to get paid what you got paid the last time you played this character. That finally worked out, and the thing that excited me was they were going to kill me off initially! I thought that would be a great thing to do. So I shot the first episode, and then I got COVID during the filming of it, and then there was a gap, and then right before I was about to start the second one, they went, “Oh, Alan, we can’t kill you. The studio won’t let us, and one of the producers cried when they read it.†So then I didn’t die. And I was so looking forward to dying!
So was the idea that originally Eli would be shot at that fundraiser instead of Frank Landau?
I didn’t know all the details, but I think so, or it might have happened in the court. I can’t remember, but he was going to go! But then Frank went instead, and I felt terrible for Mike, the actor, for him to be collateral damage, but when I heard this was the final season, I didn’t feel so bad. He wouldn’t be able to come back anyway. So what ended up happening was actually so much more exciting to play than just, you know, getting shot. Initially, I was disappointed that I didn’t die, but then I loved my Jackie O moment.
That final scene between you and Sarah Steele, as Eli and Marissa awkwardly make amends before he goes off and she prays for him, ends up being quite poignant. What was it like acting that good-bye with her?
It was weird to come back into something where you realize you’ve been talked about and your relationship has grown off camera. I hadn’t watched all of The Good Fight, so Sarah gave me a little crash course on that, and I love acting with her — she’s so spunky and odd and funny. It’s funny; it was sort of like putting on an old suit that still fits you. You know how to do this, and it all still makes sense, even though it was different. Now there were many, many more people of color, both on the crew and in the cast. I think it was brilliant to come back and see how the Kings shifted that dynamic.
To your point about money, you said in the past that CBS wouldn’t pay you or Julianna Margulies as much as you asked to return to The Good Fight in the past. Did they offer more this time around?
Well, they paid the rate. They coughed up. It was a win-win situation.
In episode two, Eli delivers the news that Alicia Florrick is now at a law firm in New York and that Peter is back in jail. Did the writers talk to you about how they’d landed on those fates for them?
We discussed it a little bit, but whenever anyone read it, it was like, Oh my God, because it felt so daring and cheeky and yet absolutely could be real. It makes sense that she might go off and do that. It also makes sense that he might be in jail. They’re always very prescient in their real-life allusions, so I think they’re, you know, having a dark kind of laugh. I could feel a collective clutching of pearls around the country as I said that stuff.
Did it take much to get back into the kind of fast-talking legalese the characters on these shows use?
The thing is I hardly ever got into the courts on The Good Wife, and I was really grateful that I wasn’t in the law scenes because they always shot them on Friday late at night. It’s deadening, and there’s all that legalese. Julianna and Christine were always like, “You little bitch!†and I’d be like, “I’m going to the country, bye!†But when I meet lawyers now, I always joke that I know everything about the law and like to go, “Objection! Relevance!†because that’s my favorite thing from lawyer shows. And I got to say that in these episodes of The Good Fight! I say it in my real life now. When people are being boring or something — “Objection! Relevance!â€
Do you have a favorite Eli moment from The Good Wife as a whole?
There’s lots of hilarious, histrionic ones like when he’s trying to strangle Frank Landau or when he chokes. But I think it’s more of the tender things that stuck with me. With Sarah or when America Ferrera was in it and there was a near-relationship that didn’t quite work out. I loved the scene when he told Alicia he deleted the voicemail and she threw all the plates at him. I loved that scene. It’s funny: Something comes into your life that you don’t really understand or don’t know what to do with — I just thought, What? — but it lasts so long and it has such a big impact on your life. I love Eli, and it’s been such an amazing thing to do.
Did you have a way of saying good-bye after doing your last take?
Actually, when we did it, I didn’t know it was going to be the last season, and part of the reason they didn’t want me to die is that they could bring me back. So it felt like, Oh, maybe it’s not coming to an end. Maybe that’s life. Maybe you shouldn’t try to end things.
When I used to do The Good Wife, at the end of every day, I would ruffle up all my balding middle-aged man hair and undo my tie and put it around my head as a sort of bandana and walk off the set like that. Then the ADs would go, “Oh, sorry, Alan, there was something wrong in the gate. We have to go again.†And I’d be like, “Ah, nuh-uh.†Then, one time, they really did have to go again, and the hair people were frantically trying to fix my hair. But I didn’t do that this time! Which is also sort of because I got COVID while I was filming the first episode. I was actually watching the first episode and pointing at the screen, being like, “Oh, I have COVID in this scene.†In the swearing scene, I definitely had COVID. Who knew!
Well, in case Paramount-Plus-Plus comes around and they revive some other The Good universe show, Eli could return, I guess.
Who knows the secrets of the magic black box? We’ll see, but it was a great ride whatever happens. I’m actually so glad they didn’t kill him because getting to act that side of Eli where he’s in shock, to go somewhere completely uncharted with the character and just to do something different, it was great.
In terms of other TV shows you’re returning to, I saw that you’re going to be in the second season of Schmigadoon!, though presumably not in the same role from the first season since they’re moving on from the Golden Age to ’60s and ’70s musicals?
It’s called Schmicago, and it’s hilarious. I play a character that’s — well, I play a butcher, and Kristin Chenoweth plays his lady. I do a lot of mincing menacingly around with a knife. I have a great chopping song.
Well, that sounds a lot like a barber and his woman companion from a famous musical …
You may think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment. But I love a part where you have to look worse when you go into makeup. That’s always great.
They found ways to have Audra McDonald and Christine Baranski sing a bit on The Good Fight, but they never did make Eli Gold sing, which is too bad.
That would be hilarious. I did once, for CBS at the upfronts, open the show as Eli and sing “Willkommen†all uptight, and then I ripped off the suit and had my Emcee costume underneath that. I’ve still got the suit. Sometimes at parties I walk upstairs and people are like, “What’s with the suit?†and then I just pull it away!