Carrie Preston teases potential tension between Elsbeth and Captain Wagner in upcoming episodes

Carrie Preston teases potential tension between Elsbeth and Captain Wagner in upcoming episodes

Consisting of ten hour-long episodes, Elsbeth season 1 concluded on CBS on May 23. The Good Wife spinoff is set to return in the fall and will see Carrie Preston’s character take on a permanent position at the NYPD. Elsbeth was originally assigned to the precinct to audit the captain, but it doesn’t take long for her to realize that he’s a man of the law. After she cracks a difficult case in “A Fitting Finale,” Captain Wagner rescinds his decision to send Elsbeth back to Chicago and encourages her to stay on his team in New York.

Preston is interested in discovering if there will be any skepticism between Elsbeth and her superior in season 2 now that everything is out in the open. Although the lawyer-turned-investigator betrayed Captain Wagner’s trust, the actor believes that there’s a mutual respect that hasn’t been eroded. She’s looking forward to future episodes and is excited at the prospect of twenty new cases for Elsbeth to dive into.

Carrie Preston chats with Screen Rant about her character’s onscreen dynamics, the final twist of Elsbeth Season 1, and future plotlines she’d like to see explored.

Captain Wagner’s Potential Wariness Could Create An Interesting Story In Elsbeth Season 2

Screen Rant: Congratulations on being renewed for season 2! I’m excited that we’re getting more Elsbeth.

Carrie Preston: Me too. I had such a wonderful time doing this first season. It was really the time of my life. I’m just thrilled that they’re giving me the opportunity to do more.

What do you enjoy most about embodying such an upbeat and extroverted character?

Carrie Preston: I’ve been playing the character for 14 years, and it was really thrilling for me to go from being the occasional guest star, playing her once a year when I would have to kind of re-introduce myself to the character each time I played her, to being able to play her on a regular basis, every day.

I got to really relax into the playing of the character and learned a lot about her that I didn’t know. I didn’t have the luxury of having a lot of screen time. When you’re a guest, you’re there to serve somebody else’s show. And so to be at the center of things—I was really honored to have that opportunity

Captain Wagner discovers the real reason Elsbeth came to the NYPD, but he ends up letting her stay in a more permanent position. What do you hope their working relationship looks like now that this secret is out of the way?

Carrie Preston: Elsbeth really won him over throughout the season with her genius approach to crimes and doing really good work for the NYPD. So when he felt betrayed, when he found out that she was there to investigate him, I think that he felt that he couldn’t trust her anymore. I’ll be curious to see, even though they reconcile at the end of season 1, if there is any residual distrust that will rear its head from time to time.

I think that always makes things interesting as storytellers, but at the same time, he’s such a good man. He sees that Elsbeth is a really good person and that she was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Hopefully, there’s a great amount of forgiveness and redemption. We’ll see how it plays out, but there is a mutual respect there that I don’t think has been eroded.

Preston Was Excited To See Elsbeth “Thrown Off Her Game” In The Elsbeth Finale

I love the friendship that forms between Elsbeth and Blanke. What are your thoughts on how that has evolved throughout the season?

Carrie Preston: It’s been so surprising and lovely to see. Elsbeth sees the good in everything and everyone, and immediately, she sees that Officer Blanke has such potential that isn’t being realized by the NYPD. So she takes it on as almost like a project to mentor her. Even though Elsbeth has never been in this position before, she does have a different way of looking at things and an unorthodox way of seeing things that I think she’s able to pass on to Officer Blanke.

Once that starts happening, this friendship comes, and it’s something that we don’t really see a lot. They have different ages, they come from different backgrounds, they are not two people that you would normally think would be friends, and yet they are really mentoring each other, and they need each other to thrive in that environment.

Moving on to the case, did you know before reading the script that Matteo would be the killer?

Carrie Preston: I don’t think I did know, because I had been asking Jonathan Tolins, our showrunner, throughout the season, “Are we ever going to let Elsbeth not know who the killer is?” Because I’m having to find fresh ways to play discovering who the murderer is within three seconds of meeting them.

And so I was happy to see that she didn’t know and that we could see her being thrown off of her game for a moment. I thought it was really important to give her that vulnerability. I really loved reading that particular script, because I didn’t know where it was going in the same way that Elsbeth didn’t know where it was going.

Preston Would Like To See Elsbeth Return To The Legal World In Elsbeth Season 2

You did some modeling in the finale. Can you give any insight into filming the runway scene?

Carrie Preston: It was really fun. We did have a consultant who is a runway model. She came in and helped me and she helped Laura Benanti to make sure that we looked somewhat like we knew what we were doing. That was fun to work with someone like that. And also, just to see six or seven models coming out dressed like my character—it was really very surreal and fun and funny. We all got a great laugh out of it. We were all taking selfies and stuff with all of these Elsbeth look-alikes.

Daniel Lawson, our fashing designer, just knocked it out of the park with this episode, because not only did he have to do the Elsbeth fashion show, he had to create two other fashion shows by two other designers. He did that from scratch, and all those designs that you see on those super tall models with the crazy hair came out of his his mind. They were built from scratch. It was pretty thrilling to be a part of that, and I know it stretched him in a great way. I was happy to see that because he’s such a genius.