Let’s say you need a woman who can slit someone’s throat, who can poison someone’s whiskey, who can smash her son’s fingers with a hammer, who can commit armed robbery with precision and glee. Perhaps you are responsible for “The Sticky,” a new Amazon heist comedy, premiering on Dec. 6, and you require an actress who can reliably crash most of a maple tree through the glass doors of a provincial office building.
Then you should absolutely call the three-time Emmy winner Margo Martindale.
So it was a mild shock, one morning in mid November, to find Martindale — just back from Toronto, where she is shooting a Richard LaGravenese series — tucked away at a tasteful Manhattan brunch spot. A further surprise: Martindale, 73, has lived nearby since 1978. She arrived for breakfast looking elegant in a black-and-white caftan, the picture of an Upper West Side matron, a matron without a sizable body count.
“I am a wimp,” Martindale confessed as she pushed some eggs around her plate. “I’m scared of my own shadow. I’m afraid of the dark.” Those dangerous women? That’s acting.
An esteemed character actress — in the Netflix animated comedy “Bojack Horseman,” in which she voiced a felonious version of herself, she was typically introduced as “Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale” — she has spent the last two decades playing a deluxe assortment of baddies, women with steel wool and spite where their hearts should be. She’ll often show up for only a few scenes in a movie or a handful of episodes on a show, just long enough to make the extremes of human behavior seem wholly plausible.
But in “The Sticky,” she is the star of the series, first on the call sheet. Martindale plays Ruth Landry, a reluctant maple syrup farmer who plots to steal millions of dollars of syrup from the bureaucrats who are trying to seize her farm. (Landry is an invented character, but the series is based — very loosely — on actual events.) To hear her tell it, Martindale approached this lead the same as she would any of her character parts — all acting should be character work, she said.
Raised in East Texas, the baby of an all-American family (her older brothers played football; she was a cheerleader and a Miss Jacksonville High School), she studied theater at a two-year college before transferring to the University of Michigan and beginning a professional career before she graduated.
She spent a decade and a half in theater, supporting herself as a spa consultant and briefly, a private investigator. In her mid 30s, her role in the original stage production of “Steel Magnolias” — she was Truvy, the gossipy salon owner later played by Dolly Parton in the film — caught the eyes of Hollywood casting directors. She had small roles in prestigious movies like “The Rocketeer,” “The Firm,” “Lorenzo’s Oil” and “Nobody’s Fool.” But nobody really knew to ask for her by name until her turn as the main character’s grifty mother in the 2004 Clint Eastwood boxing weepie “Million Dollar Baby.”
She had already made one series, Sidney Lumet’s little watched “100 Center Street.” But in the 2010s her television career began to flourish, beginning with her role as Mags Bennett, a villain in the FX series “Justified.”
Graham Yost, the creator of the series, remembered her audition. It was a scene in which Mags kills a rival. Martindale’s performance was restrained, warm, almost motherly. “Holy moly,” Yost recalled thinking.
Martindale didn’t have to reach to play Mags. “It was a part that I knew that nobody could do like me, and it was authentic to me, and I felt like I was flying,” she said. “I knew that hammering my son’s fingers was something that just would be easy for me.”
Yost doesn’t know where that ease comes from, and he isn’t sure he wants to know. “I don’t question it or really try to take it apart, because it’s magic,” he said.
Martindale doesn’t really know either, though she is aware of her strengths. “I don’t have any airs, really, and I can morph fairly easily,” she said. “I was blessed with a lot of things that go into being an actor. My imagination, for one thing, it’s out of control.”
She described a further blessing. Throughout junior high school, she wore a Milwaukee brace, a corrective for severe scoliosis. This set her apart from her peers. It honed her emotions. It made her observant. She also told a story of eagerly volunteering to work in a forensic psychiatric hospital as a teenager. Which is to say that she has always been curious about the extremities of human behavior.
“Justified” won Martindale her first Emmy, at 60, an age at which most women are considered Hollywood disposable. The FX series “The Americans,” in which she played Claudia, an icy Soviet handler, won her two more. She has since had significant roles in “The Good Fight,” “Impeachment,” “Mrs. America,” “The Watcher,” “Your Honor” and “Mrs. Davis,” among others.
Ruth, Martindale’s part in “The Sticky,” was originally created for Jamie Lee Curtis, an executive producer of the show. When Curtis had to drop out, she and the showrunners, Brian Donovan and Ed Herro, agreed who should replace her.
“It was very clear to me that the choice was Margo Martindale,” Curtis said. “She was going to be better than I was.” Curtis had of course played many lead roles; Martindale had not. But Curtis was quick to identify their similarities: “Love. Passion. Loyalty. Fight. Rage. Poignancy. Vulnerability. Grit. Humor.”
Curtis called Martindale, though the two women had never met, and told her the role was hers. Martindale was wary, not really believing that she and Curtis could share a type. But after she read the scripts, she agreed. She liked Ruth’s loyalty, her wildness, her desperation.
“Desperation is one of the funniest things,” she said.
On set in Quebec, in below-freezing temperatures, she wanted to participate in every aspect of the character. She would object, politely, when her hair looked too good for Ruth, she said. She delighted in a scene in which she used a power saw and in the one in which she drove the maple tree through all that glass.
“It was a little bit scary,” Martindale admitted.
Herro remembers her in a parking lot at 2 a.m. “Margo was a kid in a candy store,” he said. “I’ve never seen her happier than behind the wheel of that truck hitting the horn and yelling out the window.”
The actor Chris Diamantopoulos, a “Sticky” co-star who also worked with Martindale on “Mrs. Davis,” echoed this.
“Her energy is unstoppable,” he said. “She loves what she does so much, and that pervades every aspect of her being.”
Donovan and Herro felt proud to have put her first on the call sheet. “She’s earned it,” Donovan said. “She’s too good to give three scenes to; she’s got all of it. She’s got the rage, the humor, the fun. And she loves doing it.”
Curtis said something similar, if somewhat more colorfully: “Margo Martindale should get all the [expletive] flowers that our industry has.”
It’s unusual that those flowers should come to an actress in her 70s. But Martindale was playing mothers and grandmothers even as a teenager, so she feels that she has finally caught up to herself. And the roles are only growing richer, or in the case of “The Sticky,” sweeter.
She is more visible now than ever, within limits. (At the cafe, a woman hailed her, then looked confused. “Sorry,” the woman said. “I thought I knew you.”) But she likes her acting to remain invisible, which is probably why it was so hard to square all those dangerous, beady-eyed characters with the very nice woman seated opposite me, enthusing about her daughter’s recent marathon run.
Surely the Margo Martindale I know should have stuck a fork in the back of my hand by now, or slipped cyanide into my herbal tea.
That’s the trick to Martindale. She always seems to be playing herself, especially when she manifestly isn’t. Playing a nice Upper West Sider?
“That would be a job that I would really have to work at,” she said. “It would be a departure. And hard.”
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