Interview: Holland Taylor on ‘The Morning Show’ and a Spectacularly Successful Career

Holland Taylor is an exceptional actress who has been acting for over half a century. Two and a half decades after winning an Emmy for The Practice, she’s still at it with a role on The Morning Show, a guest spot on Billions, and a supporting part in the Hulu film Quiz Lady. Taylor continues to impress and find new ways to add sardonic elements to the range of powerful characters she plays.

Awards Radar had the chance to speak with Taylor about what she first thought of the character and the chance to work with costars like Nicole Beharie, Billy Crudup, and Jennifer Aniston. She also reflected back on past roles in series like Hollywood, Two and a Half Men, and The Practice, as well as the one part she rarely gets asked about but fondly recalls.

She shared her first impressions of Cybil and how that was actually the wrong take on a complicated character:

“I thought at first it was going to be a typical part that I get, which is just a powerful woman, sort of generic and not defined. And I misjudged the creators of that show, because they had very specific things in mind. She turned out to be more multi-dimensional than many that I’ve been offered to play, and really, really challenging and really interesting, because she has really obvious strengths, and then this thin streak of brittle delicacy inside that can just make her fall apart like a kid’s puzzle. So it was really wonderful to play.”

Of her Emmy-winning role in The Practice, she had only great things to say:

“Playing this very smart judge, one of David Kelley’s many brilliant projects, Roberta Kittleson was an extremely capable judge who also had kind of a racy personal life. That combination, only Kelley can come up with something like that. And that was a gift to me because it was really groundbreaking on television. It was very successful. It put me on the map in a new way. I’d been playing powerful, in a way that I personally am not, I play a lot of strong women, but this is the first time I got to play a sexy woman. And an intellectual woman at the same time, because she’s a judge. So that was a gas and I’d play that part again in a minute.”

Watch the full conversation below:

Season three of The Morning Show is streaming on Apple TV+.