ELSBETH: Carrie Preston Reflects on Elsbeth and Kaya’s Unexpected Friendship

When ELSBETH’s Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) started her collaboration with the NYPD, they were under the impression she was there as part of the consent decree—a way to make sure cases were handled properly. (Her colleagues didn’t know that Elsbeth was also there to determine if Captain Wagner was dirty.)

But as Elsbeth observed and shadowed the cases, an unexpected friendship blossomed between the lawyer and her de facto partner in crime (solving), Officer Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson).

“It’s just been such a wonderful surprise,” Preston tells Give Me My Remote of developing that dynamic. “Neither of us really knew where the relationship was going to go. But Carra is just such a beautiful, wonderful, grounded, lovely actor who has such a big heart and such empathy and compassion and joy and love—I can’t say enough good about her, and what she is bringing to the character.”

“And that’s just rare,” she continues. “Sometimes you work with people that you’re fine with and you’re [just] colleagues. But then you have people that you really connect with.”

Though on paper Elsbeth and Kaya are very different, “I liked that the characters have such different energies,” Preston praises. “I think they really play well off of each other and it’s something that we don’t really get to see a lot of. They [are] different ages, they come from different walks of life, they have different ways of looking at things. And yet somehow they are in sync with each other and it’s just so lovely to see. I hope that that will continue and that their friendship and their working relationship will flourish even more.”

The first season of ELSBETH was also a turning point for Preston, who had previously portrayed the character 19 times within THE GOOD WIFE/THE GOOD FIGHT universe, but had never gotten the chance to play her in any kind of regular capacity.

“It’s been really wonderful to live inside of the character on a daily basis, which I’d never had the luxury of doing,” she acknowledges. “I would play her, maybe, once a year—or once every couple of years. It has been really great to sit inside the skin of the character and be comfortable with her in a way.”

“Also, just to be trusted with more screen time and to be seeing her in so many different scenarios and against so many different characters,” she continues. “I guess it’s the same character, it’s just that we’re seeing more dimensions. Especially in the finale—we really got to mine some dramatic depth with her. And I think that it’s been a real learning experience to see what it’s like when she’s thrown curveballs and how she deals with them…not just doing stuff that is maybe amusing or quirky. We’re fleshing her out a little more, making her a little more three-dimensional as we’ve been going along, and that’s been really satisfying.”

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