Sarah Steele on Being a Fan Favorite, The Good Fight‘s Pee Tape Episode and What Rattles Marissa Gold
Photo: Elizabeth Fisher/CBS
A little more than seven years ago, Sarah Steele first played Marissa Gold in a Season Two episode of The Good Wife. The charmingly outspoken and refreshingly blunt Marissa quickly became a fan favorite. When the spinoff series The Good Fight launched on CBS All Access, Steele was one of the first cast members announced.
As delightful as she is, Marissa has never taken center stage. That all changes in this Sunday’s episode of The Good Fight which finds Marissa at the heart of an attack on the firm. Now in its second season (the first season was just released on DVD), The Good Fight is unabashedly taking on the current political climate (the episode titles match the number of days into the Trump administration) in a buoyant, take-no-prisoners way.
Paste recently had the chance to talk to Steele, who is currently shooting the second season’s 10th episode (of 13), about Marissa’s arc this season, why fans adore her character so much, and her hopes for her character.
Paste: This Sunday’s episode, “Day 422” is a big one for Marissa. She’s really on an upward trajectory. What’s happening for her this season?
Sarah Steele: She’s starting to really kill it at her job and people are starting to notice. She meets a fella and gets involved with him and that’s super fun. One of the really enjoyable things is she gets closer with Maia (Rose Leslie). She’s establishing a presence at the firm as something other than an assistant and starts to become someone valuable to Adrian Bozeman and putting down roots in a way we haven’t seen her do before. She was always sort of flying off and making purses in Israel and doing this and doing that. I think she means it in that first episode this season when she says, “This is the longest I’ve worked in any one job” and she really wants to stay.
Paste: This is the first time we’ve seen Marissa having any kind of romance. Was that something you were hoping for?
Steele:It’s totally something I was hoping to see. We all love doing the office stuff, but I think we are all always hoping for a little bit of the personal side of things, because you get more depth that way. It’s been great and I’ve been really excited about it. I think people wonder. I think even I wonder about what the personal life of someone this singular is like, so it’s been very fun to get to explore that.
Paste: How is Marissa when she has romance in her life?
Steele: She’s got that vivacious love of life and kind of down for anything attitude, which I think has gotten her involved with someone [played by David Call] who is a bit of a loose cannon and I think she is game for that and I think she’s excited by that. In the same way she gets bored easily, that extends to her romantic life also.
Paste: What did you think when you got the script for “Day 422” and saw what a big part you would have in it?
Steele: Last season, I was doing a play [Stephen Karam’s The Humans] at the same time that we were shooting, so there was something of a limit to how much they could use me. I was a little bit like, ‘Oh gosh, I really hope I get to do a little bit more this season now that it’s my full-time job.’ So I was just really, really excited when I read that episode and I just loved the whole thing and I just thought it was so her and what’s so great about working with the Kings [executive producers and showrunners Robert and Michelle King] is that they kind of look at what you’re doing and there’s this reciprocal relationship where they’re inspiring you and you’re coming around and inspiring them and they watch their actors and see what they’re doing and write to their actor’s strengths. So it was a great moment of, “Oh, they really get what I’m doing and they’re taking it in the directions that I want to go.”