Michelle Pfeiffer: three-time Oscar-nominated star of the silver screen and increasingly, like many actresses, the television screen (she was nominated for an Emmy for the Madoff TV movie Wizard of Lies). David E. Kelley: 11-time Emmy-winning mega-TV creator and actress-employer in everything from Ally McBeal to Big Little Lies. These two crazy kids married in 1993, but aside from the widely panned 1996 film To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday and an uncredited cameo in Kelley’s Picket Fences, never have the twain of their work lives met. According to a 2021 New Yorker profile of Pfeiffer, that’s intentional. Kelley, she said, “writes for women like nobody,” but “I’ve seen a lot of couples where they seem to have a really great marriage, and then they work together and next year they’re filing for divorce.” (Michelle, tell us who!!)
Anyway, that’s about to change: Pfeiffer has joined the cast of Kelley’s Apple TV+ show Margo’s Got Money Troubles, which comes off the success of Kelley’s courtroom drama Presumed Innocent, the rare Apple TV+ program people actually watched and talked about. Margo is based on the book by Rufi Thorpe, which according to the publisher is about a 20-year old woman named Margo who has a child with an English professor from her junior college and then starts an OnlyFans to make money. No, Michelle is not Margo. Elle Fanning is playing Margo, while Pfeiffer is playing a character named Shyanne, Margo’s mother. (The book summary I found describes Margo’s mother as a Hooters waitress.) As with many current TV projects, Nicole Kidman will also be there. As who? No idea. A mysterious woman with an unplaceable accent, surely.
Correction: This piece has been updated to clarify that this is the pair’s first project together in television. IMDb’s common cast and crew search did, indeed, let me down.