Carrie Preston first played Elsbeth Tascioni 14 years ago, and she had no idea whether she’d ever get the chance to do it again. But on the first season of The Good Wife, the veteran actor created an immediate fan favorite: a cunning lawyer as scatterbrained as she was sharp, her warmly unassuming demeanor catching her opponents off guard each time she went in for the courtroom kill. Preston’s performance, a joyously bizarre marvel, sold the shtick and then some. It was enough for her to get invited back to the legal drama for nearly every season, and in 2013 she won an Emmy for guest actress. It was a richly deserved milestone for a longtime industry scene-stealer, going back to her breakout as a gossipy bridesmaid in 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding.

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Elsbeth has lived many lives thanks to Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King, who brought her back as a recurring character in the spin-off The Good Fight. They’ve since created Elsbeth, a vehicle just for Preston, premiering February 29 on CBS and Paramount+. It’s the actor’s first time atop the call sheet on a series, after playing key parts in the ensembles of True Blood and Claws. Elsbeth finds the eponymous character in a fun new mode, catching criminals and solving crimes in an unofficial capacity alongside the NYPD. The hour-long CBS series follows a standard case-of-the-week format and heaps on the quirk, but Preston proves a brilliantly natural lead, grounding the show’s antics and finding new shades to play in when exploring Elsbeth’s psychology. You sense she’s seizing the moment. 

Between Elsbeth and her stellar work in The Holdovers, Alexander Payne’s lauded Oscar contender, Preston is experiencing a career peak she thought might never come. Over Zoom, on a rare day off from Elsbeth’s production, we discuss her long road to a deserved showcase.

Vanity Fair: How did you find Elsbeth suddenly being at the center of the story? Have you had to modulate her at all?

Carrie Preston: Somewhat, but the thing that’s so wonderful about the character is that she is who she is unapologetically, and she’s a very present person who takes in everything that’s around her. So moving this character from a legal show to what is now, in essence, a detective show, she gets to shift into more of a Sherlock or a Columbo, or even like a Murder, She Wrote, or a Monk. She’s in that genre, and I think audiences are used to seeing unorthodox or unconventional characters in that kind of a role. I don’t like to think of it as, Oh, there’s now more to do.

Break down this character’s life for me. We’re talking about going from what you assumed was a one-off guest appearance more than a decade ago on The Good Wife to your own vehicle.

I started playing this character 14 years ago, and I remember when Robert King called to talk to me about the role, he said, “She’s sort of like a female Columbo.” I didn’t really watch Columbo growing up, so I didn’t quite know what he was talking about, but I just said, “Sounds great!” I had an idea of what I wanted to do with her, but I wasn’t sure, as a guest actor, if I was going to be given permission to try that, because I wanted to make some bold choices with her and make her something that we haven’t seen before if I could—because it felt like that on the page.

The Good Wife became so known for its guest stars and giving actors, such as yourself, the opportunity to find that kind of freedom—but I suppose in season one, you don’t know exactly how far you’ll be able to take it.

No, I didn’t. And it was funny, I’m not somebody who rewatches my work, but before we started the series, I thought it might be helpful just to go back and look at the evolution of this character that we’re getting ready to see all day long all the time. It was wild because it was a bit like watching somebody else. That’s 14 years, right? They say you change cells every seven years. So I’ve probably changed cells a couple of times since I played that role. [Laughs] I could see where I wanted to go with it, but I was a little tentative at first. And then I did these two episodes at the end of season one and then didn’t even come back until season three. I think that’s when she started to find her stride.

I remember I was doing one of those episodes in season three, and the director at the time came up and said, “Can you just give me a little bit of the Tascioni?” And I thought, The Tascioni? It’s already a thing? But that told me, They want this thing where we are watching this woman thinking one thing, speaking another thing, while her body’s doing a third.” I started feeling freer, and the writers went along that journey with me, or vice versa. I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg. And we’re continuing.

You were in the midst of True Blood when you started on The Good Wife, and a few other shows you’d appeared on as well. What was navigating the guest-star circuit like, compared to True Blood or even Claws, which you joined later on?

When you’re a guest, you’re in somebody else’s house, so you take the cues from the hosts. That’s at least how I choose to approach that situation. I defer to everyone around me. Most guest stars are there to support the main cast, and I’ve made a whole career of being a supporting actor. I love to do it. I know how to do it. I came up in the theater, which is so much about giving focus and telling the story as a whole. So I just take that work ethic and bring it into all the guest situations that I’m in. As far as having creative freedom, a lot of times in television, they can be quite prescriptive. They have a short amount of time to do a lot of work, so they generally have a very clear idea of what they need and want from you. If they don’t, they trust that you have the skills to give them something that maybe they didn’t think that they wanted. When you’re a series regular and you’ve spent time in the character, you then become the authority. You also understand what it’s like to be inside the skin of that character. When I was on Claws and True Blood, I had a lot of creative license because they started to trust that I was going to bring things to life and all the cast.

You had pretty wild ensembles there.

Both cases! Wild ensembles. You know a show is going well when they step back and they don’t micromanage you anymore. They trust that you’re going to take what they put on the page and elevate it. So Claws, in particular, they really let me do whatever I wanted. I was taking it to some extremes that maybe they didn’t expect because I thought it would be fun. I would put on an accent or do a thing and come up with it. I ended up having this character that I got to be 10 different characters within one.

I know you’ve started directing for television more recently. Is there anything you learned about that process from being on the other side that you’re able to bring to this experience, being number one on the call sheet?

Really knowing in my body why we’re taking this amount of time to set up a shot or light something or take a mirror and tilt it so that the boom isn’t in the shot. Just all of the details that go into creating a television show. I’ve always been somebody who walks into a rehearsal for a television show, wanting to immediately do what the director has envisioned. I’ve always been that person, but more so than ever. They’ve been thinking about it way more than I have as far as how it’s going to be shot. I haven’t been thinking about that. I haven’t even, most of the time, seen the location that we’re shooting in. I like to fully respect that the director is going to take care of a crew of 200 people and get us through this scene and get everybody home on time. [Or] some directors actually come in without a shot list, and you just kind of work. They just work that quickly. I can’t do that yet as a director. I have to be a little more prepared.

Do you plan or hope to direct yourself here?

I did on Claws in season three and season four. Honestly, I don’t know how that would work logistically, being in every scene. I don’t know how Bradley Cooper and those guys do it. More power to them. They say it’s fabulous. They love it. I am still trying to get the hang of all this and the stamina that it takes to be there day in and day out like that, just as an actor!

What are you finding in this character now that she’s got her own series?

I feel like I can breathe into it a little more. What we’re doing here is a comedy—it’s an hour show, but it’s a comedy. There’s some subtlety to it. There’s some vulnerability that we can find in there. Hopefully we’ll be finding some more personal details about her. The show is very much case-centric, but I always like to find little grace notes, places where we see Elsbeth maybe not on top of things, what happens when she gets rattled. All those things that I didn’t have the luxury to explore when I would come in once a year and do a couple of things. That’s fun to me. I can relax into the character and find those little, tiny details that the audience may or may not even see, but I will. I’ll feel it.

I would imagine that you know how to expect, having done a few shows where you were a regular cast member for many years, that you get all that time for characters to develop.

You get to the place where you know in your bones how the character moves and thinks and sounds and all of those things. It’s new every day. You’re getting a new opportunity to try something, find something that you haven’t maybe found before deep in a thing. That’s why I love doing it. Sometimes when you’re doing a play, you have to reinvent the same material over and over again. Whereas in television, the character is consistent, but the scenarios and the situations are ever-changing, and I’m pretty mercurial as a person.

You’ve been working in this industry for a long time. It feels like a pretty significant moment—I also loved your work in The Holdovers this past fall—so what has it felt like getting to this point?

There’s something very profound and humbling when a dream comes true. It was something that I thought I would be able to rise to a long time ago, but I wasn’t ever holding on so tightly that if it didn’t happen, I would be somehow disappointed—because this business, there’s so much unknown. We don’t know anything that’s going to happen from moment to moment. We don’t. Nothing is permanent. The older I get, the more I completely understand that it’s a hard thing: We find ourselves wanting what we don’t have and don’t want what we do have, and that causes suffering. Just coming to this place of acceptance of whatever is coming my way has been a wonderful and long—lifelong—journey. So the fact that this is happening now at this time in my life, when people don’t generally get handed the leads on television shows, as a woman at my age who hasn’t become what they call a household name?

Right, not being a name is typically the main obstacle in Hollywood.

It is this ever-elusive thing that Hollywood loves to talk about. I’ve never quite understood how to get that. [Laughs] The irony is that I have a name—and it’s Elsbeth. This moment is not lost on me. The gratitude that I have for it and the appreciation for it and the desire that I have is to make it as joyful and delightful as I can for myself, for the audience, for the cast and crew around me for as long as we’re allowed to do it. Nothing is permanent.

This interview has been edited and condensed.