Elsbeth star Carrie Preston already has been surrounded by some extraordinary guest stars through the show’s three seasons, and as the CBS series heads toward its season finale, she revealed that there are more familiar faces about to show up.
“Our finale is we have the great Patti LuPone, who’s in it,” Preston revealed during the Deadline’s Contenders TV panel for the series. “She plays a cabaret singer, and then Michael Urie plays someone who’s staying in the hotel and he befriends Elsbeth – but we’re not quite sure what he’s up to.
“And let me just tell you,” she added. “I got to sit there and have Patti LuPone serenade me. What? Yeah! Yep. So you have that to look forward to, because it was pretty extraordinary, and you have to do it over and over again when you’re doing a TV show, so I just got to sit there and bask in her glory.”
Preston’s also looking forward to charting out a fourth season and populating it with even more actors she’s eager to work with. “I’m so excited,” she said. “I have a little break now, and then the fact that we get to do 20 more, we get to explore 20 more worlds in New York City means we get to have 20 more amazing guest stars.”
She continued: “I hope that and trust that we’ve made it clear that we’re like a really fun place to come and work, because I think that Steve Buscemi even asked if he could be on the show. He was watching the show and he loved it, and his wife watched it. And then he called his agents and said, ‘Do you think that they would have something for me?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, absolutely! We have something for Steve Buscemi.’ And he was great. He got to play something different than what he normally gets to play and it was good. So I think actors get to come on our show and like really do something fun for 10 days or so and then get to go on to their busy lives after that.”
Preston said she hopes to continue to find ways to incorporate characters Elsbeth already has interacted with on the previous series she appeared on before headlining her own show. “Anyone from that universe — The Good Wife, The Good Fight — is totally welcome!”
She will miss the opportunity to act opposite her real-life husband Michael Emerson, who played Elsbeth’s nemesis Judge Milton Crawford before meeting a violent end. “That’s like the whale, the Moby Dick, that she could not catch that whale. And it just, even after he’s not here anymore, it’s just haunting her. But she luckily was on to his widow, and she knew that she was up to no good.
“I think all of our guest stars are extraordinary,” Preston added, “and I am happy to say that we’re probably the only show that brought Tracey Ullman on last season as one character and has brought her on this season is a completely different character. We’ve got this whole dream that every season she’ll come on and play another killer.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.
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