Yahoo Lifestyle Matlock: Skye P. Marshall Opens Up About the Real-Life Loss That Informed Emotional Olympia Scene
Actress Skye P. Marshall tapped into a very personal loss as Matlock‘s Olympia this week represented clients who’d endured an unspeakable tragedy.
In the CBS freshman’s Nov. 14 episode, titled “Sixteen Steps,” Olympia Lawrence fought on behalf of two moms whose infant son died after ingesting contaminated baby formula. When the more emotionally available of the moms had to bow out of testifying (due to concerns about the stress affecting her new pregnancy), Olympia grappled with putting the more stoic mother on the stand — because it would mean compelling her to revisit that dark, dark place where she “can’t function,” in order to make a case for pain and suffering.
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Feeling like a “vulture” for trying to make that mom revisit her trauma, Olympia pulled Matty (played by Kathy Bates) into a private conversation — to ask about her new hire’s own loss, of adult daughter Ellie. “I know everyone says it,” Olympia, a mom herself, said, “but I do not know how you can lose a kid and keep going.” As Matty likened it to “learning to breathe again on a planet inhospitable to human life,” Olympia appeared deeply moved, tears streaming down her face.
In part because Marshall had tapped into a tragic part of her own family history.
“A personal share, that I’ve never shared with anyone, is that my mother lost her firstborn, my oldest brother, at the age of 27,” Marshall told TVLine last week.
“He was murdered,” she added.
“That is not a topic that my mother was ever comfortable sharing,” the Chicago-born actress said, “so, sitting in that scene, having a conversation with a mother who has lost her firstborn…. That’s a conversation I didn’t have the luxury of having with my mother.” (Marshall recently bought a first house for her mother Patricia, in the Oak Lawn area of Illinois.)
Marshall, in TVLine’s preview for this episode, explained how she made sure to keep her emotions in check during rehearsals of this scene, so that she could be fully “vulnerable and raw” once the cameras rolled.
“Being able to hear what Madeline Matlock says touched me to the core,” she said. “In that scene that everyone will see, I am not acting. And Kathy is not acting. I literally just had to listen and just be present and do my best to sympathize with what that experience must be like for a mother to have lost her child.”
Marshall says that while the Matlock scene was “very much art imitating life,” it was not the first time she as an actress experienced such a confluence. “I’ve been confronted by a lot of things in my life through my work where I’m like, ‘Oh, gosh. Here we go….'”
Recognizing over time that possibility, “I have hijacked a lot of characters, especially Olympia Lawrence, to therapeutically heal myself,” she said, “because the brain doesn’t know that I’m playing make-believe.
“I know that if I allow myself to feel what I’m feeling, and I know that they’re going to shoot this take maybe 30 times, that is like the ‘carpool lane’ of healing,” she posited, “because you’re emotionally freeing yourself from whatever the thought is that the artist may be connected to through the text.”
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