Lindo braces for good fight
Michael Idato discovers the veteran London-born actor is never afraid to speak his mind.
The narrative force of The Good Fight, like The Good Wife before it, is driven in part by a natural rage against injustice.
The courtroom – despite all of its modern failings in the real world – still stands as a battleground where issues can be incinerated until all that remains is the truth.
‘‘I have a hatred of injustice ... as a parent, a human being, as an African American, [that] one responds to acutely,’’ actor Delroy Lindo, who plays attorney Adrian Boseman, says. ‘‘I think Adrian does too but I think he’s much more effective at dealing with it, how he responds to injustice, than I am.’’
The 65-year-old London-born actor offers us a story from his own life: almost a decade ago Lindo’s 16-year-old son was just 8 and in elementary school when a disagreement erupted over a football. Another child said to Lindo’s son, ‘‘you can have the ball, it doesn’t matter, because when I grow up my tax dollars are gonna be paying for your jail cell’’.
‘‘When your child is going through the educational system, there are all kinds of injustices that the child is subjected to,’’ Lindo says. ‘‘Some of them are subtle, some of them not so subtle. The principal thinks the two boys are just having a disagreement, so now I have to explain why that’s not OK.’’
Solutions do not come easily, particularly to situations such as those, which leave their victims powerless in the face of indifference from others. In response, Lindo says, he has become ‘‘very zen, very, very zen’’.
‘‘I happen to be married to a woman who is brilliant, and is my intellectual superior, and so having her to bounce things off, that helps,’’ he says. And his 8-year-old son is now a 16-year-old teenager who ‘‘educates me, he also drives me crazy, but that’s his job, he’s a teenager. Learning to listen helps me manage my anger.
‘‘And believe it or not, working, the fact that I am a creative individual, and I have the huge luxury of working out a lot of my stuff through my work, that’s huge,’’ Lindo adds. ‘‘I cannot underestimate the positive impact.‘‘
At the heart of The Good Fight is the story of Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), rebuilding her life and working with Lindo’s character Adrian Boseman at the law firm Reddick, Boseman and Kolstad.
The series was spun off The Good Wife, which focused on Alicia Florrick (Juliana Marguiles), and while many of The Good Fight’s characters are strong, independent women, Lindo says he did not see the series as having an overwhelmingly female narrative, even if others do.
‘‘I don’t view the story as female-centric,’’ he says. ‘‘The writing was good and the character was fun, that’s what attracted me. Reading the initial episode there was an element of fun, sort of tongue-in-cheek, being in on the joke. That I found very attractive.’’
As an actor, Lindo says he does not fully post mortem a seasonlong performance, but he does agree the narrative arc of the show’s first season is illuminating, in positive and negative ways.
‘‘I really relished that when this character was introduced, that Adrian seemed to be in on the joke, he seemed to be in on his own joke and there was a certain kind of insouciance, a certain kind of a tongue-in-cheek-ness that I really enjoyed playing,’’ Lindo says.
‘‘I felt that throughout the season, some of the choices that I made didn’t explore that enough, the tongue-in-cheek-ness, that certain kind of insouciance, and I’d love to explore that more,’’ he adds.
The other issue Lindo had was that the series, which is set in Chicago, borrowed too much tone from New York City, where it is filmed.
‘‘Doing business in Chicago and doing business in New York are two very different things [and] one of the things I became aware of was sometimes being too direct,’’ he says.
When he was first offered the role, Lindo researched its world by spending time with one of America’s pre-eminent trial attorneys, Theodore Wells Jr.
Between filming the first and second seasons Lindo also took time out to visit Chicago.
‘‘I met a couple of very successful attorneys in Chicago because the way things are done in the Midwest, as I mentioned, it is very different from the way that things are done in New York, East Coast,’’ he says. ‘‘And so I want to have more of an insight into how one does business in a city like Chicago.’’
As a programme written and produced for a streaming platform, but still airing in weekly instalments, The Good Fight may be narratively unique. Like eating a buffet plate-by-plate, or gorging on everything at once, the two experiences can have vastly different impacts on the palate.
‘‘I don’t know the answer, I don’t binge-watch anything,’’ Lindo says.
‘‘If you binge, if you take all 10 episodes, for instance, at once, what does it do to your relationship to the show? Do you then want more, and do you... do you binge-watch immediately before the beginning of the second episode? How does it whet your appetite?‘‘
As we speak, filming has wrapped on the second season, but Lindo is reticent to say too much about what lies ahead.
‘‘What I can tell you is that we have a new partner at the firm, who happens to be my ex-wife,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m assuming that that dynamic will be explored.
‘‘And to be honest, [the longerterm storytelling] is somewhat... I don’t want to say it’s a doubleedged sword, but it’s intriguing, the prospect of being able to explore further a character over multiple seasons or two or three seasons. It’s intriguing.
‘‘The actor in me, knock on wood, the actor in me is afraid, I don’t want to become comfortable or complacent,’’ he adds.
‘‘I hope to God, however many seasons this lasts or however many seasons I am on this, to keep exploring, to keep exploring.’’ – Sydney Morning Herald
Season 1 of The Good Fight is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.