Julianna Margulies on nixed 'Good Fight' arc: CBS 'wouldn't pay' my rate

The Good Wife star Julianna Margulies almost made a visit to the CBS All Access spinoff The Good Fight this season — but the price wasn’t right.

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.”