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‘Julianna Margulies on Nixed Good Fight Arc: CBS 'Wouldn't Pay' My Rate”

The actress was “really excited about the idea” of reprising her Emmy-winning role of Alicia Florrick, “but CBS refused to pay my [ask],” Margulies told our sister site Deadline while promoting her Nat Geo miniseries The Hot Zone at The Contenders Emmys event on Sunday.

“The showrunners had found a nice away to reintroduce my character, a story that was to span three episodes” during the current third season, Margulies shared. Alas, when she asked for her regular fee — and no more, she noted to Deadline — Margulies was offered a Good Fight guest-star rate.

I’m not a guest star; I started the whole thing with The Good Wife,” Margulies explained. “I wanted to be paid my worth and stand up for equal pay. If Jon Hamm came back for a Mad Men spinoff or Kiefer Sutherland wanted to do a 24 spinoff, they would be paid.”

At the Television Critics Association press tour in February, Good Wife and Good Fight co-creator Robert King revealed under what circumstances Alicia might have appeared. “We thought maybe about making a big episode where she would be at the resistance, [and] Diane and her face each other,” King told reporters. “But that would be the end of the story. It felt like an asterisk.”

What a shame, I would have loved to have seen Alicia Florrick again. I can kind of see both sides here, I think that Julianna definitely deserves more than a typical guest star rate, CBS would no doubt have heavily promoted her appearance and gotten a lot of publicity from it. But at the same time, it does seem like a big ask for Julianna to expect to make the same as she was when she was the lead of her own show and having to carry most of the scenes. She would not be coming to TGF as star of the show in the same way, so you can’t expect to be paid the same (or well more I guess) as the lead actors when the circumstances are different this time. Plus I would imagine that a show that only streams online doesn’t have the same kind of budget as a network show like TGW?

I’m curious what the norm is in these sort of cases? Julianna at least seems to be confident that leads of a former show generally do get paid the same if they appear on a spin-off, and so that would be fair enough for her to expect the same treatment I suppose, but I’m not sure if that generally does or does not happen?

All I know is that I would have definitely been enticed to watch The Good Fight if they brought on Alicia for a three episode arc *shrugs* I keep meaning to give it another try as I loved the original show so much, and I certainly love Diane’s character as well, but for some reason I just could not get past all of the drama with Maia and her family in the first season, it was sending me to sleep. I did enjoy the first episode, but then I ended up dropping out somewhere around the fifth or sixth episode unfortunately. I have been thinking that it would be worth just starting from the second season and giving it another go though

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Either way I’m surprised that she wasn’t willing to negotiate a little bit. Obviously she does deserve to make more than the typical guest star fee when she is a big name within the show, but point blank refusing to appear without her ‘regular fee’ seems a bit strong to me when she must have been making idk half a million per episode or something with TGW I’m guessing, surely they could have met in the middle somewhere?

Edited 2019-04-08 14:55 (UTC)

hmm, it makes me wonder how much David Boreanaz was paid to appear on Buffy in Chosen.

I remember he got annoyed when Sarah didn’t ‘return the favour’ with guest-starring in the finale of his show, and it sort of come across that he saw appearing in the Buffy finale as a generous gesture on his part that he was expecting Sarah to return, so maybe we can take from that that he didn’t get his usual fee?

According to DeKnight, he did it for "not a lot of money", so I'd guess less than his usual fee.