'Suits': Troian Bellisario Previews Claire's Return — With a Clip

Mandi Bierly
Updated

Season 5 of USA’s Suits isn’t messing around. Last week’s episode ended with Harvey (Gabriel Macht) punching Louis (Rick Hoffman) and sending him crashing to the floor. This week’s episode, Aug. 12′s “Mea Culpa,” finds Jessica (Gina Torres) and Donna (Sarah Rafferty) trying to do damage control as Louis threatens to sue Harvey. But that’s not the only drama: Mike (Patrick J. Adams) and Rachel (Meghan Markle) team up for a case that, as you see in the exclusive clip above, features Claire (Pretty Little Liars star Troian Bellisario), as the opposing attorney.

Claire, who we first met in last season’s flashback episode “Fork in the Road,” is the ambitious woman Mike encountered six years ago when he was getting high and working as a bike messenger and she, then a law student, was interning at a free legal clinic. He lied and told her he was also in law school, and once she learned the truth, she dumped him.

Related: ‘Suits’: Sarah Rafferty Talks Filming Harveys’s 'Thank You’

Bellisario tells Yahoo TV that she and Suits creator Aaron Korsh had always talked about the possibility of Claire returning. “We had a lot of long-running jokes about in what capacity she would be coming back — whether it was, like, a long bender night in New York between her and Mike, or what was eventually going to happen with her character,” she says. “But when he did call me and say, ‘You know, I do have something and I want to bring Claire back for it,’ and it worked out with my schedule with Pretty Little Liars, I was just so excited to get to go back and play in the world, to get the opportunity to see what Claire is now.”

image

She’s a woman who wonders if the “Mike Ross” who’s supposed to be at the meeting is the Mike Ross she once knew, and someone who senses that Rachel is caught off guard when she’s left alone in the boardroom to fly solo. “I think she sees this woman who’s smart and driven, much like herself, and I think she really wants to do her best to work with her,” Bellisario says. “The fun thing about their relationship is that it’s only later that Claire kind of pulls out how much power she actually has, and kind of makes things very difficult for Rachel very quickly. But at the beginning, she recognizes kind of a kindred spirit, which was really fun to play.”

Related: 'Suits’ Star Rick Hoffman Critiques Fan Art

Seeing Bellisario and Markle together, it’s tough not to see a physical resemblance as well. “I think it was just kind of a happy accident,” says Bellisario, who’s Adams’s fiancée in real life. “When I first met Meghan, it was definitely kind of like, ‘Oh.’ It’s interesting that we do kind of pose a similar look. It was fun when we did get to [shoot this episode]. There are so many scenes when we are sort of mirroring each other.”

Suits airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on USA.