Yahoo Lifestyle Elsbeth’s Carrie Preston and Michael Emerson Tease ‘Danger’ Ahead After Courthouse Confrontation
Warning: The following contains spoilers for Thursday’s Elsbeth. Proceed at your own risk!
This week’s Elsbeth didn’t waste any time establishing that Michael Emerson’s character is up to no good: Within the first act of Thursday’s episode, the actor’s alter ego, Judge Crawford, was seen murdering someone. But the show’s titular lawyer wasn’t aware of that when she landed in his courtroom as an alternate juror for that very murder case.
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After Elsbeth began to pick up on Crawford’s favoritism toward the prosecution, she started to not-so-subtly help out the innocent woman accused of murder. Crawford noticed what Elsbeth was doing, even getting herself placed on the jury, but that didn’t stop her from challenging the judge. In the end, Elsbeth convinced her fellow jurors that the prosecution’s facts didn’t add up, and they delivered a “not guilty” verdict.
When Crawford then accidentally slipped an important detail about the victim’s choice of music during a conversation with Elsbeth, her suspicions about the judge were piqued even more. With this particular case still unresolved, Crawford will continue to weigh on Elsbeth moving forward.
“There’s a picture of the guy on her bulletin board, and it stays there as a reminder of the thorn in her side, the Moby Dick that she has yet to conquer,” star Carrie Preston tells TVLine. “So it feels bigger than some of the other cases. It feels harder to reach, and that’s just juicy, to have an internal engine going at all times, even when she’s focused on other crimes, that’s keeping her going.”
At the same time that Elsbeth is looking into Crawford, he, too, “is going to start trying to figure out how to be a thorn in Elsbeth’s side, as well. So he’s going to go digging,” Preston previews.
But Crawford may do a lot more than just dig, as someone who’s capable of murder.
“Elsbeth doesn’t realize that she’s in danger,” Emerson warns, “and he’s going to operate on a number of levels to try to deflate or shame her, or worse, as time goes by. But he’s got a lot of angles that he can play. He keeps showing up a little bit now every so often, just to remind the audience that someone’s out there, working to bring Elsbeth down.”
Thankfully, Elsbeth has her colleagues and friends, like Officer Blanke and Captain Wagner, to help her with her investigation, albeit with some complications.
“She’s going to start to lean on people that she trusts, but there’s certain things that she’s not going to be able to disclose from her own past,” Preston says.
Of course, Elsbeth isn’t the first time that Emerson has portrayed a villain: The actor most recently wrapped up a four-season run as the dastardly Dr. Leland Townsend on Evil, and is known for his role as Lost foe Ben Linus. So does Preston ever get unnerved by how good her real-life husband is at playing bad guys?
“Only when I watch the show cut together, like on Evil,” the actress replies with a laugh. “But he’s so good, and it’s all about loving hating him as a character. But playing with him is fun because he’s going to give you the goods. He’s going to give you stuff that’s going to make you better, and that’s what you want with any scene partner. I’m able to kind of set aside that he’s my husband, and just play with this actor who knows how to come up with really strong and interesting and provocative playing of the scenes.”
Emerson was equally impressed by Preston while reflecting on the adversarial relationship between their characters on the CBS drama.
“I have not seen her often play the kind of scenes that we had opposite one another on Elsbeth,” Emerson says. “So part of my actor brain was sitting back there, going, look, she can play this high-stakes chess game of dialogue that carries a subtextual threat, and sending signals to each other sort of subliminally or off-text. I kind of marveled at how good she was at that.”
What did you think of Emerson’s Elsbeth debut? Hit the comments!
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