Christine Baranski (‘The Good Fight’) feels ‘genuine sense of pride’ about ‘dangerous,’ ‘emotional’ series finale [Exclusive Video Interview]

“How do we wrap up, how do we accelerate this narrative not only to end this season but to end six years?,” wondered Christine Baranski when she learned that her Paramount+ series “The Good Fight” would come to an end this past fall. The long-running, critically-acclaimed show and sequel to the Emmy Award-winning “The Good Wife” was bursting with so much “psychic, political, emotional energy” throughout its run, and the actress feels entirely “emotional and very proud” of its conclusion. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

Baranski’s character Diane Lockhart was at the center of two intersecting arcs in the last batch of episodes, one involving the dissolution of her marriage to Republican, NRA executive Kurt McVeigh (Gary Cole), and the other tackling the growing threat of civil war in a politically-polarized country. “My central concern was the relationship with Kurt,” shares the actress, who explains that she felt the two characters had to have “some kind of reckoning this season” after Kurt’s “peripheral involvement” in the January 6th insurrection in the fifth season and “his continued belief system.” The Emmy winner remembers thinking, “We can’t just assume she can get into bed with someone and leave all the rest behind.”

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As the streets of Chicago erupt in violence, Diane feels an unsettling sense of déjá vu as the country once again grapples with battles over reproductive and voting rights, the Cold War, and another Donald Trump presidential campaign. To cope, the liberal feminist attorney embraces ketamine treatments, which Baranski describes as her character’s “way of being in the world without going crazy or numb.” The actress calls this season arc “really interesting terrain” and “transgressive,” especially as Diane begins to fall for her doctor, Lyle Bettencourt (John Slattery). The treatments and her flirtations with Lyle allowed her to play the role as “lighter in tonality” than the chaos unfolding on the rest of the show, and she “loved going there because I feel comedy is such a natural element to me.”

On one occasion, that lightness even led Diane to break out in song. After her first treatment, the attorney sings a few lines of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein’s “Something’s Coming” from “West Side Story.” Baranski was a personal friend and frequent collaborator of legendary composer Sondheim, and she reflects, “Now ever time I sing anything of Sondheim or even hum it, I realize what an impact he had on my life, just knowing him, working for him, and just being able to sing a little bit and have him part of the legacy of ‘The Good Fight’ is a beautiful thing.” The actress felt the song was “very apt,” too, for how it nodded to the “impending sense of doom” that starts in the very first scene of the season premiere and explodes — literally — in the series finale.

SEE ‘The Good Fight’ finale: From WGA nominee to Emmy contender?

While the world of “The Good Fight” unraveled, one of the balms for viewers was the central relationship between Diane and Audra McDonald’s Liz Reddick. Last season featured the two named partners at loggerheads over Diane’s lead role at a historically Black law firm, but in the final season they have reconciled their differences. Baranski says she and co-star McDonald “were protective of that relationship” and “treasured our time working as actors together.” “One of the most wonderful things about the show,” recalls the actress, “is Diane was always at the end of the day having a drink with Will Gardner (Josh Charles), with Adrian (Delroy Lindo), and then her drinking bud became Liz… I love Liz, Liz dug me, we got each other.” The actress thought their dynamic on screen showed how “basic humanity” “transcends all of these identities we create, these constructs.”

This season, it was Diane’s relationship with Kurt that came under intense strain, and in the penultimate episode, “The End of Democracy,” Diane ends their marriage in a heartbreaking scene. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt that much pain playing Diane, maybe the death of Will Gardner,” muses Baranski of the standout moment, continuing, “I don’t think I ever invested more in a scene, cared more about the playing of the truth of that scene.” She and Cole have been working opposite each other in these roles for 13 years — Cole has appeared in every season of both “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight” in 38 total episodes — and the Emmy-winning actress shares of their rapport, “I love Gary so much and he was the perfect acting partner. He was the perfect man for that role… You don’t get to that wonderful richness, I think, without having spent a lot of time with an actor.”

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Baranski calls that penultimate episode her favorite from the series “dramatically.” As for her favorite overall, she points to the fourth season premiere “The Gang Deals With Alternate Reality,” in which Diane imagines what the United States would have looked like had Hillary Clinton won the presidency in 2016. What begins as a liberal dream turns into a nightmare as the character realizes that without Trump’s victory, there may have been no national reckoning with sexual assault and no #MeToo movement.

Although Diane and Kurt do reconcile in the series finale, “The End of Everything,” the episode overall feels cataclysmic with the law firm under attack as white supremacists open fire on the office. When Baranski read the “dangerous” final script by Robert King and Michelle King, she “marveled at the originality of the writers.” The actress chokes up when speaking about the final scene of the series, which she shared with McDonald and which she felt was “exactly right.” The two-time Tony winner feels a “genuine sense of pride” about the finale and the series overall, observing, “The Kings manage to make chilling and dramatic actually creative and in some ways really witty and almost surrealist and fun. I don’t think any other show captured that… I’m terribly proud.”

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