"Fooled the audience": When Matlock stars talked about their characters and how twists lie ahead for the CBS legal drama

Matlock is nearing its explosive two-hour finale of season 1. We see Kathy Bates's Matty use her expertise and fool everyone around her to reach her final goal.

In a 2024 interview with TV Insider, Kathy Bates talked about how portraying this role at 75 made her feel lucky. Talking about her character, she said,

"She uses her lifetime of experience and wisdom to really connect with people, instead of Googling everything, and that helps her solve cases. She doesn’t live her life through a screen. She lives it looking into people’s eyes and having real relationships."

In the same interview, Bates also talked about how her character might be able to fool even the audience with a shocking twist that could be introduced at the end of season 1. She stated,

"At the very end, just when you think Matlock has only fooled the people in her life, you realize she’s also fooled the audience."

After watching season 1 of the legal drama, we can be sure that Kathy Bates’s Matty might still have some tricks up her sleeve to solve the case and find out who stole the Wellbrexa documents.

More on this in our story.

Matlock cast talk about their characters

As Kathy Bates described how her character uses her age and the invisibility that comes with it as an advantage. She said:

"I’ve never thought at my age I’d be playing such a wonderful role and for network, which so many people are going to see. And to play such a complex character, a woman who seems forgotten and invisible but isn’t, and uses what’s considered a liability [her age] to her advantage and to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes."

To add to that, actor David Del Rio, who plays the character of Billy, also talked about how Matty is also going through a learning process just like everyone else.

Other than Kathy Bates, Skye P. Marshall also talked about her character, Olympia. She shared:

"She fights for justice and she spent many years working in corporate litigation and she did not feel like it touched her soul or anyone else’s necessary, and so she went out and she started finding people who could not afford a lawyer like Olympia Lawrence but she took them on as pro bono so that she can do good but also make a lot of money through other civil actions around their cases."

She continued:

"But she has a bit of a messy life and so in order to balance personal and professional, she has this wall up she doesn’t trust easy, and she doesn’t let people in, and Madeline Matlock pops in and somehow finds cracks in the castle wall and so over you know the season, you’ll start to see their relationship and evolved and you know they are definitely not friends but they’re also not just colleagues."

Furthermore, EP Jenny Snyder Urman also talked to TV Insider and shared her wish to write a story about older women being neglected in society. She stated:

"I wanted to write about how older women are overlooked in society. I wanted our heroine to be constantly telling the audience that she’s being underestimated, for the audience to enjoy watching her take advantage of that underestimation. And then, by the end, shock the audience when they realize they, too, have underestimated Madeline Matlock."

Matlock is gearing up for a huge twist at the end of season 1

While solving different cases in Jacobson Moore, Matty also continues to do an investigation of her own to get justice for her daughter Ellie’s death. The series is filled with many twists and will go on surprising the audience till the end. EP Jennie Snyder Urman shared how she was hoping the twist at the end would shock the viewers. She shared:

"I hope so. I love that feeling of being genuinely shocked. And it’s rare because audiences are sophisticated, so we were really hoping that it would be as shocking as you’re saying it was. So that’s good."

She also talked about how Kathy Bates found the twist the most compelling, which added several layers, making the story even darker.

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Catch the season 1 finale of Matlock on CBS.

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