You know, it’s funny, I have been told time and again how awesome our female characters are. And for me – and I love them all. I don’t think in terms of “do we need male characters and female characters?” I just feel like it’s a natural thing. That you live in a world [where] you interact with men and with women and you want to have a rounded out world with people of all genders. And I want all of my characters to be strong and interesting and funny. So I didn’t really say I need to specifically make these great female characters.

I just wanted to populate a realistic world and these are the women that came out. But the one exception is, I don’t even know if Gina Torres knows this, but in the original pilot the Jessica character was a man. And the studio encouraged me to make it a woman. And at first I resisted only because I don’t like change and they were trying to dictate some change to me. And I was like, “But this is who it is.” And then I embraced it, and I loved it.

And then at some point they questioned it and thought maybe we should put it back to a man. And by then I loved it so much as a woman, I thought it was such a great idea that I was like no, we need this character to be a woman.

My favorite scene so far this season was the scene between Harvey and Louis in which Harvey actually backs him up and tells him that he’s the hardest working person in the whole firm. What went into writing that scene? What made you decide that you wanted to put that scene in?

You know, it’s funny – that might be one of my favorite scenes. There are so many of my favorite scenes it’s hard for me to say… The writers, as I say, they come up with so many great ideas and so many great stories and they’ll usually pitch me the bones of the story. And when I get in there I’ll pick and choose the things I like about it.

And somewhere, I don’t 100% remember, but in the discussion of all of us it just came out. And we were like this would be a great opportunity for Harvey to really give Louis some love.

I mean what I like about a lot of these characters, and it’s true of people that you work with, sometimes they piss you off and sometimes you don’t like them. And sometimes you like them. It’s just never as simple as I do like them or I don’t like them.

So it just kind of came out. What usually happens is we’ll come up with the story collectively in the room and then the writer writes an outline. We give them notes, they rewrite and then they write it in draft and then they rewrite.

And then for the last version, we’ll go through it and I will do the rewrite with the writer. So Erica Lipez and I wrote that scene together and we had so much fun doing it. And it was just a great time. And then I remember telling Rick and Gabriel about it while we were shooting the first episode of the season. I told them it was coming.

And I said I looked at it like – I play a lot of basketball, less now that I’m so busy. But I play a ton of basketball and you can have people that are your archenemy on the court, and then sometimes you’ll run into them in a Starbucks and you’ll see them in their day clothes and maybe they’re with their wife and child and you’re like oh, this is a person, and you’ll have a pleasant interaction with them and you’ll like them.

And I said that’s to me what this [scene] is. It’s like you guys are somewhat enemies on the court but this is like – it’s a moment where your guards are down and I just thought it was fantastic. And I will say it was directed excellently and performed excellently. They did a great job.

Some of my favorite scenes are actually with Donna this season. She kind of knows everything. Did you have someone in your life that kind of just knew everything and they were kind of your partner in that?

No… You know it’s funny, most of the [characters], when you write them they just come out is all I can say. When I wrote them they just came out. I didn’t really base any of them on anyone that I knew.

But Donna came out and emerged over time. She just seemed to know things and she seems to know everyone in the firm. And she seems to know everything that’s going on and she seems to just have a super sense about her even though she isn’t necessarily maybe the intellectual equivalent of some of the people that she works with.

But she has the emotional intelligence, so to speak, that a lot of people don’t have. I will say the name Donna I took – there was a woman that I worked with at my first job whose name was Donna so I picked that name. But she was not really based on anyone real.

I do tell my wife that sometimes Donna reminds me of [her] but I didn’t think about it. That would have been a subconscious thing that came out. Although in episode 205 you find out where Donna is from and I did end up picking the town that my wife is from.

There seems to have been allusions that maybe something romantic happened between Donna and Harvey in the past. Is that intentional, or are you still deciding whether or not you want to take their relationship in that direction? What’s going on there?

It’s interesting, you know, we do keep alluding to it. Here’s the thing. I have in my head an idea of their past history, if any. I have a story in my head that happened with them in the past that is slowly being revealed over time.

However, the story that I have in my head, it evolves. And sometimes, we’re just writing something and something comes out. For example we were doing the rewrite on episode 9 just a couple of days ago and some more alluding to their past came out. And we keep kind of peeling back small layers of it.

But you’re right, we have left open what really happened. In my head, I still have a story that is consistent with everything we’ve said so far.

But it’s interesting to me how when we say something different people will watch it and be positive that it means one thing or another. And I’ll sometimes get tweets that say, “You can’t! You said this…” And I’ll go back and I’ll watch it and I’ll say “No, we didn’t exactly say that.” But you took that meaning from it, which I like.

In my mind, they at least skirted with the idea of having something happen.  That’s the best I can say.

Did that story involve a can opener because I’m still baffled by the can opener.

No, that story does not involve the can opener. The story of the can opener was, last year I was writing the finale and I said something and it was going to be a ritual.

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About The Author

Bell Peloquin is a Blast staff writer. He writes the Film and Television Buzz blog.

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