“Suits” star Sarah Rafferty would gladly return to play Donna Palsen in the recently announced spin-off.
“Donna lives in my heart always,” Rafferty told TheWrap during an interview for her upcoming Netflix series “My Life With the Walter Boys.”I’m always open to let her out to play.”
The USA legal drama surged in popularity over the summer when it made the charts for four consecutive weeks after its first season debuted on Netflix June 17. It also landed in top spots later in August. The show reported 18 billion streaming minutes consumed in July 2023 alone.
“I was gobsmacked and grateful. You can’t really get your head around what billions of minutes mean. It’s kind of too much to compute, except for being super grateful that people were finding it and that it was providing a service to them in any way, whether it was escapist, or that they were connecting with their friends or their family members over it,” she said. “I’ve had some feedback that people just feel like they know the ‘Suits’ characters so well because there’s so many episodes. They feel like it’s family with that familiarity. I think that’s incredibly beautiful and gratifying to hear. That built me up.”
Rafferty was previously barred from speaking up about the streaming success of “Suits” due to the months-long SAG-AFTRA strike, which she admitted “didn’t feel great.”
“But what did feel good was the solidarity that came out of that: the support of the sister unions, the sheer numbers of people that showed up on the line and the leadership of SAG and the tirelessness of the negotiating committee,” she said.
The deadline for voting on the strike-ending proposal between the union and the AMPTP arrives in just under one week. Guild members aren’t likely to vote fully in support of the deal, largely because of lingering concerns over AI protections.
Rafferty said her experience with ‘Suits’ streaming and concerns over fair pay and residuals in such circumstances gave her a unique vantage point through the vote and she’s been “happy to have that opportunity to highlight those things.”
“Those are things that we made great strides on, and I’m really grateful for the work that the leadership has done. I stand behind them in terms of they’ve offered that this is a fair deal and a historic deal,” she said. “I think it’s really important that everybody gets back to work. Everybody does get a vote and everybody needs to have their vote. So we’ll see how everybody feels about it in the days ahead.”
You can next see Rafferty play the role of Katherine Walter, matriarch of the Walter family alongside patriarch George Walter (Marc Blucas) in the upcoming Netflix series adaptation of Ali Novak’s novel “My Life With the Walter Boys,” out Dec. 7.
