Margo Martindale: ‘Nothing makes me happier than desperate people being funny’

There are nice people in Hollywood, and then there’s Margo Martindale.

Not only was she five minutes early for her interview with Gold Derby, she kept the date even though she had fallen on black ice the day before, fractured her eye socket, and had a face full of nasty-looking bruises, cuts, and stitches. “I didn’t want to cancel,” she says humbly (watch above). “This side of Margo Martindale is perfectly fine,” she says, pivoting her uninjured profile to the camera. “This one — not so much.”

The Emmy-winning star of Justified and The Americans is now winning raves for her star turn on Amazon Prime’s The Sticky, a dark comedy about an unlikely, bumbling trio who team up to pull off a maple syrup heist. (Yes, you read that right, and yes, it’s based on a true story.) “I was trying out some makeup for Season 2,” she jokes.

SEE Margo Martindale cooks up a maple syrup heist in ‘The Sticky’ trailer

Martindale plays Ruth Landry, the brains of the operation — a maple syrup farmer who enlists in the crime out of desperation. “I honestly had an absolute blast doing it,” she tells Gold Derby. “Nothing makes me happier than desperate people being funny.”

Her casting was a comedy in and of itself — Jamie Lee Curtis had originally signed on for the role, but when she had to back out due to scheduling conflicts, she insisted that Martindale was the only one who could replace her. “I thought, in my head, in what world?” Martindale recalls with a laugh. “But I loved it the moment I read it.”

Stepping into the role also meant that she would be number one on the call sheet — the first time in her career that the 73-year-old actress had ever been the lead. “It was an honor,” she says. “I love acting no matter how you throw it at me. But it was an honor to lead the tone of a show, meaning not the tone of the story, but the tone of the atmosphere of the group that, everybody’s kind to each other and supportive.” Martindale has long been called a “character actor,” but that label has no meaning for her. “Acting is character acting,” she says. “You think Meryl Streep‘s not a character actress? She’s a character actress.”

She has thought about revisiting some of those roles that brought her acclaim, like Mags Bennett in Justified. “I thought about doing Mags Bennett as a younger Mags Bennett or something like that. But I don’t want to touch that part. I want it to stay exactly as it was.” And what about Claudia in The Americans? Where is she now? “Probably as dead as the doorknob.”

While this role may not have been written specifically for her, she worked with the writers to make it her own, and that’s what she looks for in the scripts she chooses.

“Television’s more, for me, alive right now. Now that doesn’t mean I don’t wanna do another movie,” she says. “But with TV, you can lead the writers a bit if you want to — if you’re really sneaky.” Just like Ruth Landry.