The actor Christine Baranski on “The Good Fight,” and Kurt Vile on Songwriting

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2019

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Christine Baranski was a successful theatre actor who would never stoop to do television in the old days. But when she got the pilot script for “Cybill,” and had two daughters to put through school, she took the role of Marianne, the tough-talking best friend of Cybill Shepherd’s character. “Who goes to Hollywood at forty-two and becomes an overnight star?” Baranski asks the critic Emily Nussbaum. What made her such a sensation? “No one had seen that woman on American television” before, she notes, of her character, a badass with a Martini and an attitude. “Sex and the City” came later. Playing strong women seems to come naturally to Baranski; since 2009, she’s portrayed the capable, elegant Diane Lockhart, in “The Good Wife” and then “The Good Fight.” She talked with Nussbaum in a live conversation at the 2018 New Yorker Festival. Plus, Amanda Petrusich talks with the musician Kurt Vile, who performs his song “Pretty Pimpin” live.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the
0:06.1	New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:10.8	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Emily Nussbaum watches more TV than
0:17.0	any 16 people I know. She's the New Yorker's television critic,
0:20.9	and she won the Pulitzer Prize for her work in 2016.
0:24.3	So when Emily Nussbaum gets excited about interviewing an actor,
0:29.2	you know there's got to be a good reason.
0:33.8	I'm delighted to welcome Christine Beranski,
0:36.7	who's not only a quadruple and probably more threat performer and a radical fashion inspiration,
0:44.3	but my personal guide through today's political hellscape.
0:52.3	In her current guise as Diane Lockhart
0:56.0	on the wonderful CBS drama, The Good Fight,
0:58.7	and on
0:59.1	Ms. Boransky's been
1:03.5	micro-dosing her way through the Trump apocalypse,
1:06.4	becoming appropriately unhinged
1:09.6	in a series of the most amazing necklaces on the planet.
1:13.7	Thank you.
1:15.3	Buransky was already a stage veteran, performing Shakespeare and winning Tony Awards on Broadway,
1:21.1	when she suddenly shot to fame on television with the show Sybil.
1:25.7	She played Marianne, a martini-swilling best-friend character who got most of the best zingers in the show Sibble. She played Marianne, a martini-swilling best friend character who got most of the best zingers in the show.
1:32.2	She danced with Robin Williams in the bird cage and crooned with Merrill Streep and Mamma Mia,
	...

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