‘Matlock’ Is Back! Skye P. Marshall Celebrates Her Breakout Role — and Teases ‘Twisty’ Season 1 Finale
Alison Foreman
Skye P. Marshall isn’t religious, but she does believe in magic. You’d have to have some faith in a higher power after the few years she’s had. For the “Matlock” actress, 2020 and beyond has been a veritable hot streak of impeccable timing, great luck, and classic Hollywood fairytale. Few TV actors experience such good fortune, especially these days — but Marshall’s breakout role on CBS’s buzzy legal drama didn’t happen overnight.
“I didn’t have the courage to ask for what I wanted to do with the rest of my adult life until I was 27,” Marshall told IndieWire, looking back on the decade since she moved from New York to California. “Everyone thought I was crazy. They were like, ‘Do you have an agent?’ ‘No.’ ‘Any formal training?’ ‘Not really.’ ‘You have friends in LA though, right?’ ‘No, I do not.’ It was a cocktail of a disaster of an idea — and I was sipping every drop.”
Charismatic and elegant, intimidating yet approachable, Marshall’s “Matlock” character Olympia Lawrence is the latest in a long line of scene-stealing TV attorneys played by talented Black women. Co-starring with Kathy Bates as the titular Matlock and Jason Ritter as Olympia’s ex-husband/colleague Julian, Marshall cites Viola Davis in “How to Get Away with Murder” as her main muse. It’s a fitting character comparison considering, just eight episodes into the series, Olympia is being investigated for a young girl’s death and grappling with adultery — both plots Davis’ fictional attorney knew all too well.
That drama and more awaits when “Matlock” returns from its mid-season break tonight, Thursday, January 30. The rest of the season airs weekly (with new episodes streaming the following day on Paramount). Then, it’s on to the already-confirmed Season 2 and the next step in Marshall’s joyous creative journey.
“The thing I’m most excited about in Episode 9 is that Olympia is going to finally find out who Julian cheated on her with,” Marshall teased to IndieWire. “That episode was also the most fun I had on set because we were allowed to deliver a lot of physical comedy and very playful improvisation, Kathy and I, that you don’t really get to see often. Having that for us to do together, just to experience her like that, was so special. Don’t get me started on her with Adam Sandler in ‘The Waterboy.’”
Developed by Jennie Snyder Urman, the new “Matlock” is something of a misnomer. The reimagined TV classic only vaguely resembles the retro reboot you might have expected in the streaming age. Nevertheless, the show built up a weekly audience averaging 13.2 million viewers last fall — and continues to attract critical recognition. Unlike the episodic procedural from the ‘90s, modern “Matlock” follows multiple mysteries that continue throughout Season 1. Going by the alias Matty Matlock (an explicit nod to the original TV show), Bates stars as the wealthy undercover attorney Madeline Kingston. A fierce dark horse, Kingston is in fact a lawyer, but she’s been driven to extreme grief after losing her daughter to the opioid epidemic. In the pilot, Matty infiltrates Jacobson Moore — that’s Olympia’s law firm — to find and unmask someone there she holds responsible.
“The irony is not lost on me that ‘Matlock’ is centered around Big Pharma,” said Marshall, whose last job in New York was actually in pharmaceutical marketing. “Seeing that in the script just sent me to the floor laughing, but again, it all speaks to surrendering and to following those signs.”
Born in Chicago, Marshall remembers being “thrust into a tutu at the age of five” for dance recitals and community shows. The arts were always appreciated in her house, but acting was a “hobby” never presented as a real profession. Instead, she enlisted in the military and served as an active-duty member of the Air Force to afford college tuition. She attended Northeastern Illinois University (“with Uncle Sam as my sugar daddy,” she joked) and graduated with honors.
“I always enjoyed chasing that challenge, but I did those things because people told me where all the challenges were — whether it was the military, college, or corporate,” she said. “But now, with ‘Matlock,’ whatever I have been talking to is talking back.”
After two years living in New York, the future TV star felt stuck in her business career. Then, the housing market crashed. At a time when others clung to the stability of their cubicles, Marshall felt more inspired to give hers up. She was already acting (at places in the city like the Broadway Dance Center and the Stella Adler Studio of Acting) as a kind of “therapy” — but began to experience increasingly “vivid dreams about LA.”
“I kept waking up in the middle of the night and something just didn’t feel right,” she said. “Then it started to cross into reality, where I would see tourism ads for California on posters or pictures from LA when I got on the subway. People I knew would suddenly say to me, ‘Oh my God, have you ever thought of being an actor? I think you’d be good at it.’ It was everywhere.”
Marshall took the leap and finally came to Los Angeles in 2009. The struggle she endured out west is highly romanticized and, it’s worth noting, does not work for all people. But at least for the true-hearted actress, old Hollywood hustle turned Marshall’s dream into a reality — slowly but surely.
Courtesy Paramount/CBS
Throughout her thirties, Marshall toiled away at a grueling double life. An undiscovered talent at central casting by day, and a cater waiter gleaning industry tips and connections by night, she treated every gig as a chance to learn. Having “begged” the second assistant director on “CSI: New York” to make her a permanent background actor, she took up residence there as a forensic lab technician for more than a year. The actress found another major opportunity for growth with her first recurring speaking role for “Shameless.”
“I learned a long time ago that it’s not about what you’re doing, it’s about who you’re being while you’re doing it,” Marshall said. “I used that opportunity as a background actor to not just be an extra, but to be a paid intern. Television production was a whole new dialogue that I had to learn and a whole new way of being.”
Marshall appeared in scads more series in the coming years, from “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Dexter” to “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” and “9-1-1.” Still, Marshall was set on making it to network TV — and she always had a particular fondness for CBS.
“My first vision board when I got to LA was a CBS procedural drama, and my first apartment I moved into was directly across the lot on Radford,” she said. “I could see over the wall. I would sit on my balcony with my coffee, and I would just visualize me being a regular on a CBS show. And I sure was, but as a background actor first. That’s how I learned specificity in your prayers is key.”
Before “Matlock,” Marshall became a series regular on the CBS medical drama “Good Sam.” She got herself the part of Dr. Lex Trulie by DM-ing creator Katie Wech on Instagram, and sprang into action when the showrunner asked her to come in for a spur-of-the-moment audition.
“If I had not sent her that DM that day to then answer that call to then be at CBS, all within a three hour window, I would’ve missed that opportunity,” Marshall recalled in awe. “And when I got to the network test, guess what? That’s where I met Edwin Hodge. He is now my husband.”
Courtesy Paramount/CBS
Marshall recalls encountering two more people who would change her life that day. According to the actress — who beams with joy at every turn telling her story — in the next room were producers Jennie Snyder Urman, the eventual showrunner of “Matlock,” and Joanna Klein, executive producer of “Matlock.” When Marshall finally got her hands on the pilot script, she knew she had found “a new role to obsess over” and booked the opportunity to read for Olympia.
Neither Urman nor Klein told Bates they had worked with Marshall before the audition. Walking into the room, she recalled seeing major names up for the role on the call sheet and took particular note of the “designer purses on the couch.” Fearless, the fledgling actress asserted her chemistry with the Academy Award winner anyway — and asked for a hug upon entering.
“It’s a cardinal rule that you don’t touch celebrities unless it’s in the scene, but she came right towards me,” Marshall said. “I just knew if she could feel my heart pounding out of my chest, I knew that Ms. Kathy Bates — the one who was the unknown for ‘Misery’ when everybody was pitching all the big names — I knew she would see me.” She did. Marshall learned after the audition that Bates turned to the room and said immediately, “Well, it’s her, right?”
Speaking with IndieWire from Chicago, the actress splits her time between both coasts and taking care of her elderly mother in Illinois. Landing Olympia on “Matlock” allowed Marshall to buy her mom a house, and forged a familial bond between her, Bates, and more of the “Matlock” team.
“When people circulated pictures of us in Times Square looking at that billboard and us crying together, those were real tears because I couldn’t believe that I was in Times Square with Kathy Bates after accomplishing such a feat of a TV season,” said Marshall. “And Kathy could not have imagined being a poster girl at 76 — by herself. Tell me the last time you’ve seen her by herself on a billboard. With her extensive resume and me being a new discovery, we met each other in that moment with the exact same emotions and the gravity of what we had created together.”
Threatened by the promise of a “twisty” Season 1 finale, Olympia and Matty’s evolving trust could come crashing down at any moment. But for the leading “Matlock” ladies, their onscreen connection and real friendship seems almost fated. They’re bound in not just in mutual admiration, but also their show’s greatest secret.
“Not even my husband has any idea what’s coming,” Marshall said. “It’s really good. He has no idea. No one in my life, none of my best friends, only the people who had the script at that table, know who’s responsible for [Matty’s daughter]. I cannot wait for that rollercoaster and getting to that answer — because right when you think you figured it out, you didn’t. And I get to do all that with Kathy.”
“Matlock” returns with the rest of Season 1 on Thursday, January 30 at 9 p.m. ET.
