Tom Pelphrey ‘never had more fun playing a role’ than he did playing Don Crowder on ‘Love and Death’

Joyce Eng
·6 min read
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If you are checking out “Love & Death” for Tom Pelphrey, there’s not a whole lot of him in the first four episodes. The actor plays Don Crowder, who seems like just another unassuming parishioner at Candy Montgomery‘s (Elizabeth Olsen) church. After she is accused of murdering her friend Betty Gore (Lily Rabe) with an ax, Candy retains Don as her defense attorney, and the last three episodes of the Max limited series are basically The Don Crowder Show. But when the role first came to him, Pelphrey was only sent the first four scripts of the David E. Kelley-penned true crime drama.

“I was told that the fifth episode starts the trial and I spoke with David about it and he said, ‘Don really becomes a central figure in the storytelling.’ And David also told me, ‘Do yourself a favor and start looking into who this guy really was because I think you’re gonna love him as much as I do,’ he tells Gold Derby. “And I do. He was right.”

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The two-time Daytime Emmy winner “loved every second” of playing Don, a straight-up showman whose confidence and courtroom theatricality were never in short supply. “I never had more fun playing a role than I did playing Don,” Pelphrey states.

An undersized collegiate football player whose career was cut short by injury, Don transferred his competitive spirit to the legal arena, becoming a personal injury lawyer. Candy’s case was the first criminal one he ever tried. You might think that would put him at a severe disadvantage, but Don just weaponized the tools at his disposal. What he lacked in criminal trial experience, he made up for with his proficiency at crafting a media-friendly narrative to engender empathy from the jury for Candy. Pelphrey believes Don was “built to step into that particular moment” because at the time, in 1980, the sensationalized media coverage of crimes was nothing like it is now, let alone in a small town like Wylie, Texas.

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“Having all the history with the personal defense and having a sense of showmanship and a flair for the sort of dramatic and a keen understanding of controlling the narrative, and because of the press’ obvious intense interest in Candy’s case, I think Don knew how to handle that in a way that most of the lawyers wouldn’t have,” he explains. “We’ve gotten so used to the idea of the media covering cases and crimes, but this was so novel back then. The idea of a rush of cameras and microphones at the courthouse and understanding how to navigate that was, I think, a gift that Don had that other lawyers didn’t have. … He understood the real impact of shaping how the jury was seeing and the story they were telling about his client. He was perfect for the moment.”

On the show, Don initially does not believe Candy when she tells him she murdered Betty, thinking his friend was not capable of such a brutal crime. The turning point, Pelphrey feels, is when he observes Candy’s visceral reaction while she undergoes hypnosis by Dr. Fred Fason (Brian d’Arcy James), who unlocks suppressed trauma from her childhood and later testifies that she had a dissociative reaction triggered by a word Betty said.

“I would imagine that what he saw in Dr. Fason’s office was so horrifying and upsetting to him that he was like, ‘OK, if that’s the feeling that we elicit, then we need to defend her,'” Pelphrey says, adding that the hypnosis appointment is the one thing he would ask Don, who died by suicide in 1998, if he could. “I would ask him to tell me what he felt or saw in Dr. Fason’s office. I would be curious to see how exactly that landed on him. I interpreted it as something that moved him and surprised him.”

When he’s not defending Candy, Don’s lifestyle and personality are equally as loud and assertive. Don loves to tan — Pelphrey spray-tanned twice a week and got “my whole body sprayed down, made f—ing disaster of my bedroom and my sheets and my clothing” — and is a taxidermy aficionado, which manifests in him housing a bunch of dead animals in his terrarium desk. “If you really take a second and pause the screen and zoom in on the amount of animals that are stuffed inside that desk, it is shocking,” the Emmy-nominated “Ozark” alum notes. Don also is not afraid to go toe to toe with Judge Tom Ryan (Bruce McGill), whom he frequently calls “fat f—.”

“‘And we’re gonna get a new trial on the grounds of fat-f—ism,'” Pelphrey says, quoting a Don line. “I felt like a kid again. I felt like I was in high school. I was sitting at home, reading these scripts, like, ‘I can’t believe I get to go into work and say this sh–. I can’t believe I get to go play these scenes.’ It was a f—ing blast. And Bruce McGill, who plays the judge, obviously is such a f—ing pro, such an amazing dude. He’s been doing this at the highest level forever and he was so much fun to work with and such a good sport about our banter and our back-and-forth. It really was so fun, you almost feel like you should return the money. … David was like, ‘I almost wanna write a Don Crowder spin-off.’ I was like, ‘I’m here for it.’ And we can say all the ‘fat f—s’ we want.”

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