We Have Been Obsessed With Marissa Since 'The Good Wife'
May 7 2020, Updated 1:20 p.m. ET
Ever since we first met her in The Good Wife as the outspoken daughter of Alan Cumming's Eli Gold, we've been rather obsessed with The Good Fight's spunky Marissa Gold, and have enjoyed watching her climb the ranks as an investigator over the past four seasons.
In fact, we were initially unsure she would make it to the Christine Baranski spinoff, considering most of her role in The Good Wife involved being Alicia's famed "body woman." But when creators Robert and Michelle King asked her to return for The Good Fight, our prayers were answered and luckily, the actress couldn't turn down the offer.
Since reprising her role for the spinoff, we've gotten to see Marissa move out of her father's shadow and into the role of Diane's secretary, eventually becoming an investigator alongside Nyambi Nymabi's Jay Dipersia.
Keep reading to learn more about Marissa Gold's character, and about Sarah Steele, the actress who plays her.
Marissa Gold wasn't originally meant to be a regular character.
In an interview with Hollywood Reporter, actress Sarah Steele explains how "amazing" it is that her character, which was originally meant to appear for only two episodes, developed into a full-fledged series regular.
"I auditioned for [The Good Wife] my junior year in college and at the time I auditioned for it, it was only supposed to be two episodes of introducing this character of Alan Cumming's daughter. I went in and there was no discussion of, who is she?" Sarah landed the part, filmed her two episodes, and went on with her life.
"I was a fan of the show," she adds, but wasn't expecting her character to make a return. "I thought, 'OK, that was a great job.' And then I got to have this much more major arc than I had anticipated on The Good Wife and now I'm getting to carry it through as a full-fledged character on this show. I feel like it's been a totally unconventional way of becoming a series regular on a show."
Sarah Steele on being the show's "anti-Kalinda."
Sarah reveals that the Kings saw Marissa's role as being opposite from The Good Wife's original investigator Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi). "[Marissa] has a way of getting information out of people that is very different from Kalina," Sarah explains.
"Kalinda is sneaky and mysterious and Marissa is very open and is easily underestimated and people sort of tell her things sometimes without even realizing that they've done it because she's easy to talk to," Sarah continues. "That was sort of the discussion that we had when we were first talking."
"I was definitely intimidated," Sarah says of taking on this role of new investigator, where she'd inevitably be compared to Kalinda, who came before.
"I loved Kalinda, but that's why it was comforting to me in that conversation I had with them that the idea is not for Marissa to be Kalinda. The idea is for her to very much be her own person and I do think that it's a very smart move in that you do trust Marissa to get to the heart of things."
"It's super fun to play a woman like that on TV," Sarah adds.
Where else can you see Sarah?
"I, for a long time, dealt with Hollywood not knowing what to do with me," the 31-year-old actress says to All Arts. Sarah got her breakout role in 2004's Spanglish, then went on to act in Law & Order, Gossip Girl, Blue Bloods, and Nurse Jackie before landing the role of Marissa Gold.
The Columbia graduate is also a theater actress, and starred in the Tony Award-winning play The Humans concurrently to filming her first season of The Good Fight.
Follow her on Instagram where she shares behind the scenes pictures of her time on the CBS hit, as well as fun peeks into her personal life.
The Good Fight is streaming on CBS All Access. New episodes premiere on Thursdays.
