Christine Baranski on that viral Elon Musk pic and name-dropping him in 'The Good Fight'
A look is worth a thousand words — or in this case, a few punchy lines in an episode of "The Good Fight."
The sixth and final season of the hit CBS show is a spinoff of "The Good Wife" and returns Sept. 8. Christine Baranski has played the lead role of Diane Lockhart for the past 13 years across both shows and is now one of the producers of the spinoff, too.
She told Entertainment Weekly that a meme of her staring at Elon Musk at this year's Met Gala inspired her to write the Tesla CEO into the final season. The show conveniently has a tech billionaire of its own in Neil Gross, played by John Benjamin Hickey, who owns a version of Google called Chumhum. Baranski said he appears in the series' second-to-last episode, where she gets "to bash the billionaires a bit."
“I’ve added a few lines (to the script)," Baranski said, “and I actually will include Elon Musk in the final episode.”
At the Met Gala on May 2, Baranski was photographed with a look of alarm as she stares at the SpaceX founder, someone she has criticized for not allocating some of his wealth to causes she thinks are more worthy than space travel. Baranski told EW that she did not make that face on purpose.
“The funny thing is I have no memory of turning back and glaring at him, but I was actually dissing him as I was waiting in line to go to dinner,” Baranski told EW. “I was with someone who was at my table, and I noticed Elon Musk and I went, ‘Oh my God, it’s Elon Musk,’" she recalled saying to the person sitting with her.
She continued, "'I don’t know how you feel about him, but why is he spending billions of dollars in space when he could be cleaning up the planet?’ I’m an environmentalist. I must have at some point turned back and looked, but I did not pose for that picture.”
Taking ideas from real life and adding them to the show is common for Baranski and "The Good Fight." Season Six will include Roe v. Wade and voting rights cases, according to Deadline.
Robert King, the show's co-creator and co-executive producer, told Deadline that he wanted to create a sense of déjà vu for the audience to make it "fun in a last season."
“Maybe this sounds like we’re recycling, but we want Diane to have a sense, haven’t I done this before? Haven’t I done that before?" King told the publication. "That just felt like a way to be kind of meta and reflect what we thought was going on with liberals and progressives around in a sense that we thought these fights were done."
