So far on this season of The Good Wife, Peter Florrick performed oral sex on his wife Alicia in the bathroom, and Kalinda and Blake’s charged relationship developed a sexual undercurrent after she took a baseball bat to his car and then cupped him off-screen. And in a panel on the show last night at L.A.’s Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the show’s creators indicated that this was mere foreplay for the rest of the antics they have planned. “Within the next three or four episodes, we do see the climax of the situation between Blake and Kalinda, which is very provocative and quite a stretch for network TV,” said co-creator Robert King. On the red carpet before the event, he also told Vulture that viewers will see Kalinda’s sexuality expressed in a more overt way when Jill Flint’s FBI agent Lana returns. “We’re seeing how far you can get away with [going on] a ten o’clock show.”
The battle royale between Blake and Kalinda will crescendo as the show prepares to say good-bye to Kalinda’s foe. “We knew we only had Scott Porter for a certain period of time because then he would go do pilots,” King explained to us. “So we were building towards some kind of major reveal that Blake had on her. … We want to go out with a bang with them.” Added Archie Panjabi, “After she whacked the car with a baseball bat, the tension between them kind of changed. You were never sure if it was going to be sexual or violent. Well, over the next few episodes, that tension definitely does escalate to a point where it does take one of those routes.” The reveal, which Panjabi told Vulture is “something I didn’t expect,” comes around episode seventeen. While the actress and producers are mum on details, Vulture can rule out one fan theory floating around on the Internet, judging from the laugh that it got when presented to King and his wife/co-creator Michelle: that Kalinda has a porn star past because of the way Zach was ogling her in the episode “Nine Hours.”
Also, look for Cary and Blake to share their first scene together in tonight’s episode. Matt Czuchry told us, “There’s an investigation that’s ongoing with Kalinda. Blake’s a factor in that. And also, Cary’s a factor in that. … Cary chooses sides.” (By the way: Vulture will be interviewing Czuchry tonight for a future Chat Room. Do you have any follow-up questions for him? Post them below!)
The other question on viewers’ minds: Will Alicia and Will ever find time to have that talk? Michelle King would only coyly reply, “It’s on our mind, too.” For her part, Julianna Margulies told the panel moderator, Entertainment Weekly’s Dalton Ross, that she has asked the producers not to tell her the outcome of the love triangle, as she wants to remain in the moment and keep things fresh. While “things are coming to a head” — no pun intended? — Margulies thinks Alicia “truly needs to find out who she is without a man.” Unfortunately, Chris Noth and Josh couldn’t attend last night to state their characters’ cases.
The most interesting revelation of the night, however, was that Eli Gold was almost played by Nathan Lane. “Nathan wanted to do it very badly,” said casting director Mark Saks. “He [finally] called and he said, ‘I can’t do this. I’m in The Addams Family on Broadway. I can’t make this work with the schedule.’ I said, ‘No, no, we’ll accommodate you. We’ll make it work.’ He said, ‘It’s just too difficult for me.’” Saks was on the phone with Lane’s CAA representative when the agent suggested another of his clients, Alan Cumming, for the role. “I said, ‘You’ve been telling me Alan Cumming won’t do television for a year now,’” continued Saks. But as luck would have it, the actor was dropping out of Spider-Man, so the timing was right for a change of pace for Cumming, who “to this day says, ‘I think of myself as a character in drag,’” recounted Saks.
