Lockhart Gardner: Attorneys at Law. The Good Wife premiered on CBS in 2009 and starred Julianna Margulies, Josh Charles, Christine Baranski, Matt Czuchry and Archie Panjabi.
While the legal and political drama ran for seven seasons, Charles (Will Gardner) and Panjabi (Kalinda Sharma) both exited the series before the 2016 finale. Charles, for his part, walked away from the show after season 5 in 2014.
“It’s been one of the greatest gigs for me in my entire career, but at the end of last year, my contract was up and I was just ready to kind of move on,” the actor said on the Late Show With David Letterman at the time. “I think it was great for the show and also I think was a proper goodbye to the character, so that was special.”
Following Charles’ exit (and the shocking death of his character), Margulies (Alicia Florrick) revealed she tried to convince him to stay.
“I called Josh, and I gave him terrible Jew guilt. I knew he was about to get married. I’m good friends with his wife, and they’re dear friends of ours. I said, ‘Josh, how about this: 15. Think about it. Wait. Think about it. Money in the bank for 15 episodes. Do you know how expensive it is to have a baby in New York City?’ I went right to the kid thing, and it was disgusting, honestly,” she told Entertainment Weekly at the time.
One year later, Panjabi left the show in 2015 amid reports that she and Margulies didn’t get along — and used body doubles to film Alicia/Kalinda scenes from season four on. While the former ER star has called the reports “silly gossip,” Panjabi has played coy about her early exit over the years.
“In terms of anything that happened on The Good Wife, I think it’s only respectful for it to stay on The Good Wife,” she quipped at the Television Critics Association’s press tour in 2016. “It was time for me, for many reasons, to unzip the boots and step into another show.”
Four years later, the New York Times asked the actress about the alleged feud. “We are living in a world where everybody wants to know everything. I completely understand why everyone asks about it,” Panjabi said. “Everybody I meet asks me about it in some roundabout way.”
Panjabi didn’t leave the show on bad terms with everyone, however. Czuchry (Cary Agos) gushed about his former costar during an exclusive interview with Us Weekly in January 2021.
“She’s one of my best friends,” the Resident star said. “We’ve stayed in touch very closely. We talk about personal things [and] we talk about professional things. So, to have a friend like that is deeply special. … Some of the things that we talked about way back in season 1 and season 2 of The Good Wife [about] where we wanted to go in the future with our careers, I think we’ve realized that a little bit. … With Archie, she always talked to me about [how] she’s Indian and when she was growing up, she didn’t see people on TV who looked like her.”
Following The Good Wife’s 2016 finale, the series creators debuted a spinoff, The Good Fight, starring Baranski’s Diane Lockhart on CBS All Access.
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This post first appeared on Usmagazine.com
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