Kathy Bates as Madeline “Matty” Matlock. Sonja Flemming/CBS
Kathy Bates made it clear she doesn’t actually have any plans to retire yet.
“I think people got confused and thought I was going to retire,” she told People on Wednesday, October 9, while discussing the success of her new CBS series, Matlock. “What I meant was, how can it get any better? I would love for this to keep going.”
Bates, 76, did admit to growing frustrated in the past due to the limited roles available to women her age.
“I remember calling my agents and saying, ‘I think maybe I want to go into, if not retirement, semi-retirement. If I can’t afford to keep my house, I’ll sell it and maybe go to New York,’” she recalled. “Then this happened. I couldn’t believe it.”
The actress made headlines last month when she seemed to allude that Matlock was her final project, telling The New York Times, “This is my last dance.” Bates had plans to move on from acting after a movie shoot “soured” her on the experience, but Matlock changed her mind.
“Everything I’ve prayed for, worked for, clawed my way up for, I am suddenly able to be asked to use all of it,” she added at the time. “And it’s exhausting.”
Bates plays Madeline “Matty” Matlock on the series, which premiered on September 22. Despite sharing the same last name as the iconic Matlock from the ’80s, Matty was introduced as a former lawyer hoping to get hired at a prestigious law firm after falling on hard times.
It was later revealed, however, that it was all an act. Matty is actually the wealthy Madeline Kingston, who went undercover at the firm to track down who is responsible for her daughter’s death. The current suspects on Matty’s list include Olympia (Skye P. Marshall), Julian (Jason Ritter) and Senior (Beau Bridges) — all of whom could have had access to documents that would have taken opioids off the streets before her daughter died from an overdose.
Kathy Bates as Madeline “Matty” Matlock. Brooke Palmer/CBS
“Certainly, I think that there’s a level of guilt, which is in the deep marrow of Matty. The fact that she feels tremendously guilty that she failed her child, and was unable to win the battle between the drugs and her child’s future, no matter what she did,” Bates told Entertainment Weekly after the premiere. “And also the level of, she’s been grieving for 10 years and I think she spent the last couple of years with her grandson Alfie cooking up this plan and using their wits. And I think all of that level of excitement and joy of working with him and finding that he was very passionate about bringing those people to justice that killed his mother.”
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After the surprising twist, showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman reassured fans that the show won’t continue to hit them with narrative shake-ups.
“It’s not that suddenly the whole show is going to flip and what you thought was true is no longer true. It’s not that, certainly not,” she told TV Insider. “It’s more just, we continue to reveal things and hopefully you’ll get a sense of surprises. And the case has its own reveals in what she knows and how she knows. But the person that she tells us she is at the end of the pilot is the person she is.”
New episodes of Matlock air Thursdays starting October 17 at 9 p.m. ET during CBS’ official premiere week.
