Lovers of The Good Wife found the death last spring of Will Gardner, everyone’s favourite sexily arrogant lawyer, shocking and traumatic. But even as they adjusted to the cold new reality (Will was never coming back), they were struck by a frisson of something that felt, inappropriately, like delight.
It arrived in the form of Finn Polmar, a sweet and morally upright prosecutor whose entrance just as Will was exiting provided solace to both the audience and the grieving characters in the show. If this sudden attraction seemed disloyal — Will is dead; long live Someone Other Than Will — then so be it. As Alicia Rancilio of The Associated Press tweeted some months later: “I miss Will Gardner, but I do love Finn Polmar.”
What does Finn, aka the British actor Matthew Goode, make of all this?
“You can’t replace Will — you can’t replace a character who’s that influential and that loved,” Goode said recently. “But what they have tried to do with Finn was make him be one of the few people so far on the series who doesn’t have hidden agendas, who is sort of morally unambiguous.”
Goode, 36, let a wicked smile cross his face. “Although you might find out he’s a coke dealer in a couple of weeks,” he said. “Things can flip quite quickly on this show.”
Things can also flip quite quickly in Goode’s life. Long one of those slightly-under-the-radar British actors who log one impeccable performance after another, Goode is suddenly showing up all over the place. Perhaps best known in America for his handsome turn as Colin Firth’s longtime boyfriend in Tom Ford’s A Single Man, Goode in the last few years has played (briefly but memorably) a dashing 18th-century naval captain in Belle; the caddish Wickham in the BBC adaptation of P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley; and a charming yet psychopathic uncle in the thriller Stoker. This winter, he injected a little sex appeal into The Imitation Game, playing a brilliant and flirtatious code breaker, a welcome foil to Benedict Cumberbatch’s aggressively unflirtatious Alan Turing.
But it is in The Good Wife — where he enjoys smouldering, get-a-room chemistry with the title character, Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) — that Goode has truly made his mark. Now into its sixth season, the series is still a favourite of audiences and critics, even though Alicia is not behaving with particular goodness (or wifeliness) these days.
Charles’ decision to leave last season deprived the show of one of its most enticing plot lines, Will and Alicia’s steamily tortured on-again-off-again relationship. In looking for a replacement, The Good Wife show runners, Michelle King and Robert King, sought to introduce a character of a different sort, someone who was cerebral and slyly disarming, in contrast to Will’s street-smart scrappiness.
“We wanted someone who was witty in court, who didn’t hit you with brass knuckles but when you weren’t looking might devastate you with his wit,” King said.
They had seen Goode in various productions, including the pilot of the sadly aborted Ridley Scott mini-series The Vatican, in which he played a priest — what a shame about that vow of celibacy. (Showtime cancelled the project.) They hired him without even meeting. “He had this spectacular sense of humour on the phone, and that’s what Julianna is into — she likes having a good time with someone who is funny,” King said. “You want someone who is not too unctuous in his acting, who can take a U-turn from drama to comedy in a moment.”
Interviewed a week or so before Christmas, Goode in person was not unctuous at all and had the added bonus of speaking in his real English-accented voice. (For his character in The Good Wife, he found some videos of a New York lawyer on the internet and copied his accent; Goode would not reveal the name of his unwitting partner in this one-sided arrangement.)
His immediate future seems slightly up in the air, though it is unclear if he knows more than he is letting on.
One complicating factor: He materialised recently as a dashing aristocrat on British television in this year’s Downton Abbey Christmas special.
Apparently, he has good chemistry with just about everyone. “There can surely be no finer features on screen than those of Matthew Goode,” Viv Groskop wrote in The Guardian.
Unfortunately for fans of The Good Wife, this raises the possibility, Goode said, that he might appear in further Downton episodes.
The intersecting part of the Venn diagram of people eager to see Goode in The Good Wife and those eager to see him in Downton Abbey is surely huge. Goode allowed that while he is likely to move back to England soon (although he is not sure when), he could, if necessary, commute back and forth for further Good Wife filming.
Which explains nothing. What is he doing next?
“Don’t know yet,” he said, flashing another smile. “Couldn’t tell you.”
