Kathy Bates made history this year with her Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series nomination for CBS’s “Matlock,” becoming the oldest person ever nominated in that category. The 77-year-old Bates, who already had 13 previous Emmy noms and two wins, broke the record previously held by Angela Lansbury, who was nominated in the category for “Murder, She Wrote” at the age of 70.
But lest this particular record paint Bates as a creaky old thespian setting records in her twilight years, it’s worth pointing out that she’s the youngest of the oldest Emmy nominees: The most senior winner in every other acting category is older than Bates is now, with eight categories featuring nominees in their 80s and Cicely Tyson holding the overall record for her Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series nomination (for “How to Get Away With Murder”) at the age of 93.
Still, it wasn’t too long ago that Bates herself thought that forced retirement might be looming. “It’s just unbelievable,” she told TheWrap of the attention that she’s received for “Matlock,” showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman’s sly riff on the hit Andy Griffith series of the 1980s and ’90s. “Jennie is, for sure, the goose that laid the golden egg.”
Where Griffith’s Ben Matlock was a folksy country lawyer who fooled everybody into underestimating his ability to win a new case every week, Bates’ Madeline Kingston, aka Matty Matlock, is only pretending to be a folksy country lawyer so that she can bring down the law firm that hid evidence proving that a pharmaceutical company’s promotion of opioids helped kill her daughter. Matty wins cases and forms bonds along the way, but her Matlock is playing a deeper, darker game than Andy Griffith’s ever did.
And that made the part irresistible. “I had no expectations when I got the script,” Bates said, “and I hadn’t seen Jennie’s other show, ‘Jane the Virgin,’ which I hear was very successful.” At first, she read the pilot script uninterested in playing just another lawyer — but then she got to the surprise ending in which Matty’s true intentions are revealed via a huge bulletin board with photos and info on the law firm she’s infiltrating.
“It just opened up so many avenues,” she said. “She looks at that murder board and you realize that she has researched every single person in that firm. I thought, ‘This is thrilling.’”
But it was also a tricky acting job — because from the moment her character walks into the firm, bluffs her way into a place on staff and finds herself working on cases, Bates is asked not to be Matty Matlock, but rather to be Madeline Kingston playing Matty Matlock.
“They have the same root, but they’re very different,” she said. “To me, the biggest challenge was in the first episode, when she goes into the boardroom for the first time. I had to come in and be a complete character. I’m sure she practiced with [her husband] Edwin constantly to figure out what she was going to say, how she was going to behave. She goes in there and she has to be this other person, and the closest she comes to showing her cards is when she realizes that she’s dealing with real people. That sort of slipped her mind.”
“It’s one thing to rehearse at home and another to walk out there and deal with people’s lives as a lawyer.”
Then again, Bates herself has plenty of experience walking into rooms and being someone else. A native of Memphis who studied theater at Southern Methodist University, she moved to New York City in 1970 to pursue an acting career, making her film debut in a small role in Miloš Forman’s 1971 comedy “Taking Off.” She sang a folky original song she’d written called “And Even the Horses Had Wings” in an audition sequence and was billed as “Bobo Bates,” but it would be another seven years before she appeared in her next movie, “Straight Time” with Dustin Hoffman.
She spent most of the ’80s on stage, earning a Tony nomination for the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “’night, Mother”and winning an Obie for “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” But when those plays were made into movies, Sissy Spacek and Michelle Pfeiffer were respectively cast in the roles Bates had originated.
“It’s a shame,” she said of “’night, Mother.” “Indies weren’t really happening back then, and they obviously felt that they needed names. But it didn’t turn out to be as rich an experience as it could have been if they had cast Anne [Pitoniak] and me, because we had been working on those characters for almost three years. I feel we deserved to be in the film.”
She shrugged. “But that’s the way it goes.”
She landed a breakthrough film role in 1990 when Rob Reiner cast her as the deranged superfan Annie Wilkes in his hit Stephen King adaptation “Misery.” In the film, she keeps an injured writer (played by James Caan) imprisoned in her mountain cabin until he rewrites his latest book for her; the action is brutal and hellish, but Reiner and his cinematographer, Barry Sonnenfeld, kept the atmosphere light and funny on the set.
“We did a thing for TCM recently, Rob and I, and the audience was howling with laughter while we were backstage waiting,” she said. “He said, ‘I forgot how funny this movie is.’ And we really did have so much fun.” The athletic Caan, meanwhile, went stir crazy because the part forced him to stay in bed for most of the movie. “Oh, Lord,” Bates said softly, remembering the late actor. “Jimmy, Jimmy.”
“Misery” won her a Best Actress Oscar and launched a film career that would include “Fried Green Tomatoes,” “Dolores Claiborne,” “Titanic,” “Primary Colors,” “The Waterboy” and “About Schmidt,” along with TV roles in “The Late Shift,” “Six Feet Under” and “The Office,” among many others. She didn’t get as many lead roles as she would have liked, but she worked steadily even as she was battling and beating ovarian cancer.
Then, in 2012, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy, leaving her with lymphedema in both arms. For Bates, more than just her career seemed to be slipping away.
She regained her footing when Ryan Murphy offered her roles in three seasons of “American Horror Story,” resulting in three Emmy nominations and one win. And that’s where “Matlock” came in. She got the script on a Friday and met with Urman the following Monday, peppering the showrunner with questions. “I liked her tremendously,” Bates said. “We sat there for a long time, and we got right down to work.”
With the second season now in production, they’re still deep in the work. “I love the arc for Season 2, and I think it’s very smart,” she shared. “Of course, one of the most interesting struggles is going to be in this [platonic] love story between Olympia [the high-powered lawyer played by Skye P. Marshall] and Matty. And there are going to be a lot of wonderful new characters as well.”
The record-setting Emmy nominee stopped, wary of disclosing any details about a series that is fairly addicted to twists and cliffhangers. Then she broke into a grin. “I’m just so lucky.”
This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more of the issue here.
