It’s an established fact that Texas native and national treasure Margo Martindale makes everything she’s in just a little bit better. She moves with
It’s an established fact that Texas native and national treasure Margo Martindale makes everything she’s in just a little bit better. She moves with ease between stage and screen; she’s great at playing mothers, schemers, and both at the same time. She’s so beloved that the very idea of her inspired the funniest running joke on BoJack Horseman, where for six seasons Martindale voiced a heightened version of herself who was always referred to as “Character Actress Margo Martindale.” The character had such an impact, says Martindale, that for a period in 2015, her Wikipedia page noted that Martindale “has spent the last year in prison for armed robbery.” (For the record, that was cartoon Margo, not the real deal.)
If peak TV taught us anything, though, it’s that actors like Martindale thrive even more when they’re the stars of the show. See, for instance, her unforgettable arc on the second season of Justified as Mags Bennett, the matriarch of a Kentucky holler crime family capable of making even perennially nippy Timothy Olyphant quake in his boots. Martindale won her first Emmy for that role, radiant at 60 as she accepted her statuette with a fitting quote: “Sometimes, things just take time. But with time comes great appreciation.”
Her latest showcase is Prime Video’s quirky crime comedy The Sticky, out December 6, which puts the now 73-year-old actor at the head of a caper based on the infamous real-life crime referred to as the Great Maple Syrup Heist. Martindale was unfamiliar with the incident before signing up for The Sticky. “I thought it was a joke. It sounds like it,” she tells me over Zoom. “It was fabulous to find out it was real. That makes it much more exciting. I find it unique and different, and it has that Fargo-esque tone.”
As Rich Cohen explained in his 2016 Vanity Fair feature on the crime, Quebec makes a full 72% of the world’s maple syrup. As a result, it’s been able to set the price of that valuable product. “As of this writing,” Cohen continued, “the commodity is valued at just over $1,300 a barrel, 26 times more expensive than crude.” Canadian maple syrup thieves, in 2011 and 2012, cleverly stole nearly 10,000 barrels of the substance from Quebec’s primary reserves: worth 18.7 million Canadian dollars (or about $13 million), to be precise. The crimes were so Canadian that it felt like self-parody, as if an vintage SCTV skit had come to life and run off with the largest amount of money in Canada’s history.
A television adaptation was almost inevitable. The show was produced by Blumhouse Television and executive produced by Jamie Lee Curtis—who actually called Martindale out of the blue to get her on board. Martindale remembers the Oscar winner’s pitch, slipping effortlessly into a lightweight, precise impression of her: “‘Hello, Margo, it’s Jamie Lee Curtis. There’s a show I’m producing that I was going to do, but I can’t do it because of my schedule. I thought, Who’s the most like me of anybody I know? And I said, Margo Martindale.’” As Curtis complimented her, Martindale’s first thought was that the comparison seemed ludicrous: “In what world?” she wondered. Still, her fellow actor made Martindale agree to do the show even before she read it; happily, everything worked out.
Martindale is self-effacing; she is, after all, a three-time Emmy winner (getting two statuettes for her guest role as Keri Russell’s handler on The Americans) whose IMDb page reflects her workhorse pace, with an astounding 131 roles since her onscreen debut in the behind schedule ’80s.
Back then, she had already been making a name for herself in the theater, originating the role of Truvy the hairdresser—written for her, specifically—in Steel Magnolias. It’s very uncomplicated to play six degrees of separation with Martindale, who’s dabbled in witchcraft with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman in Practical Magic, squealed “Dewey!” as Ma Cox in the forever relevant musician-biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, and gone toe to toe with Meryl Streep in August: Osage County—and that’s barely scraping the surface. She has sweet words for Paul Newman, with whom she acted in Nobody’s Fool (1994) and Twilight (1998): During rehearsals for the former, she noted, “I took my sandwich to eat at another table because I was so intimidated by Paul Newman.” Newman would later see Martindale on Broadway, playing Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “The last time I saw him, he said, ‘You’re blowing ’em off the stage, mucho. You’re blowing them off the stage.’” She pauses. “Paul Newman. Wow.”
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