'Suits' Postmortem: Carly Pope On Louis's New Friend
Warning: This interview contains spoilers for the “Turn” episode of Suits.
While the drama continued with Mike in prison this week on Suits (he finally agreed to turn rat on his roommate because it’ll eventually lead to an early release), Louis continued to provide the comedy. This hour, he met an architect named Tara, played by Carly Pope, who shares his love of opera, ballet, and proper use of space. He hired her on the spot to redesign the firm’s layout, but when Louis professed his love at first sight to Jessica, she told him to call it off. Louis did rescind the offer but made Tara another one: She could redo his Hamptons home, excuse us, “satellite office.”
Pope had been a faithful viewer of Suits early in it run but then life (and the Golden Age of TV) got in the way. “When this [opportunity] came around, I think it was even before I auditioned that I felt like, ‘Right, that show that I really enjoyed, let me have another look.’ I started watching it, and I watched the entire fourth and fifth seasons in a weekend,” she says. “It reinvigorated the love and the lust for the show because it’s delicious. It’s an amazing show with incredible people and a depth of relationship that is really exciting. A lot of the times, things can settle in a procedural sort of feel or an episodic feel. In this, you really do have the serialized element — you know that what you’re doing today might play back into something that’s happened four seasons ago.”
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Her approach to Tara was to simplify her as much as possible. “She just really loves what she does. She sees the world artfully. To then be recognized by somebody else, i.e. Louis, who is akin to those ideas, who has the same synchronicity with the artful ways of life, it makes things easy because we see eye-to-eye, ” she says.
The audience knows that Louis has ulterior motives for hiring Tara, but does Tara? “A lot of [Louis’s tells] happen without her noticing. A lot of the delight of the dynamic is unbeknownst to [Tara], which is great,” Pope says. “I can’t wait to see how that goes. Rick is so good at what he does, he’s so funny, he’s so dedicated. He knows Louis back to front. It’s very exciting to play off of somebody who’s so alive and present in the moment.”
She notes that Tara is seeing Louis on his best behavior. “She’s not really privy to the Litt-isms that tend to exist within his space,” she says with a laugh. “She sees him as somebody who is incredibly gracious, makes her feel very worthy, special, and important. … When we first meet Tara she’s going in all professional, but she’s also very eager to please her client and be appreciated for what she’s doing. My mom used to always say to me that someone comes into your life at the precise time that you need them, because you need to learn a lesson from them. There’s something to learn from everybody that comes into your life. I love this idea with regards to Louis and Tara, because I think that in a lot of ways, they guide one another. A lot of what you see transpire between them, or develop between them, or occur between them, has a lot to do with what they might both be missing in their life and how they facilitate growth in one another.”
As shown in the photo above, we will see more of Tara as she does her redesign for Louis. We’ll also get to learn more about her. Pope created a backstory for the character that turned out to be similar to what the show’s writers had in mind. “Essentially I was trying to create a reason why she is so married to work, why she is so involved in what she’s doing, why she loves what she’s doing so much, why she needs to be in love with what she’s doing so much,” she says. “I remember listening to a Ted Talk that was all on the power of design prior to starting this. It was this idea that every child is an artist. Beyond that, it’s architecture, and we have buildings around us all the time. We spend about the same time amongst buildings that we do with loved ones. … I was trying to infuse her with the reasons why she loved what she does so much. Those things come to the forefront as we see her more and more.”
Suits airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on USA.
