Spoiler alert: This article contains details about Season 1 and the upcoming Season 2 of the series.
When Michelle Pfeiffer signed on to star in The Madison, she didn’t realize how painful it would be.
“It didn’t occur to me what it would mean for me to have to be grieving for three months,” the Oscar-nominated actress told Gold Derby at an FYC event for the Paramount+ series in North Hollywood, Calif., on Saturday. “[Season 1] really only takes place over six days, so the intensity of that grief is very raw.”
Calling that monthslong filming process “challenging,” she added, “I knew I’d be doing some grieving, but I don’t think I realized it would be quite on that level.”
Pfeiffer stars as Stacy Clyburn, a self-described “city mouse” and the matriarch of a New York City family who travel to the Madison River Valley in Montana after a devastating tragedy upends their lives.
The actress noted that “everybody took care of me,” adding that the cast “could just feel what I was going through, and they just knew when to come in and support me.”
The series, from Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan, launched on the streamer March 14 and has already shot Season 2, although a premiere date has not yet been announced. Season 3 has also been greenlit.
Pfeiffer joined fellow executive producer and star Kurt Russell (Preston) and cast members Beau Garrett (Abigail), Elle Chapman (Paige), and Matthew Fox (Paul), as well as executive producer and director Christina Alexandra Voros for a panel discussion.
Russell, who plays Pfeiffer’s onscreen husband, had to film his Season 1 scenes right before production moved ahead with Season 2 due to a scheduling conflict with his Apple TV series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
“That was Paramount having a belief that it would be a good show and worth doing two seasons, and that allowed me to shoot everything, the first season, like three, four weeks before we started in the second season, and it worked out,” the Emmy-nominated actor told Gold Derby. “And Michelle had to work the whole first season just assuming it was going to be me.”
“Fortunately, I know Kurt from Tequila Sunrise, and he makes a lasting impression on someone, right? And I was so excited,” Pfeiffer told Gold Derby. “After his name was brought up, I couldn’t imagine anyone else playing that part. So it was really easy to conjure him up, you know, his rhythms and his humor. And, you know, when he gets a little bratty.”
“Worked out,” as Russell put it, is an understatement. The series debut represented the most-watched first season launch of any Sheridan-created show, pulling in 8 million views in its first 10 days.
“What I have been the most surprised by is how kind of deeply this show resonates with people and most surprisingly men,” Pfeiffer said on the panel. “I think it’s given people an opportunity to just let it out. And maybe especially men, maybe they don’t give themselves permission to do that.”
While Russell agreed that the show appeals broadly to both men and women, he credited Sheridan’s scripts for the reception.
“I think Taylor Sheridan is a wonderful writer. And I think often we get credit as actors for things we don’t deserve. When you have great writing, you just do it,” he said on the panel. “It’s actor-proof.”
While the prolific series creator wrote all six episodes of Season 1, Voros directed the entire block. On the panel, Voros said she had to “pinch” herself because the material felt so intimately familiar.
“There are a lot of elements in the story of Madison that very intimately felt familiar,” Voros told Gold Derby. “I grew up on the East Coast. I met my husband, who’s a cowboy. I moved out West. I discovered the West through his eyes. I rediscovered parts of myself through traveling to the West that I didn’t know existed when I was a city kid living in New York.”
The multihyphenate also noted a deeply personal connection to the story’s themes.
“I lost my father 10 years ago,” she added. “And so the combination of the meditation on loss and the way we find parts of ourselves in the places that we least expect all really resonated with me.”
Voros isn’t the only member of The Madison team who has experienced the loss of a parent. Chapman, who plays Stacy and Preston’s youngest daughter, easily related to her character’s emotional arc.
“I lost my dad when I was 11,” Chapman told Gold Derby. “I have three siblings and a mother who’s a widow. Grief is so interesting because it starts someplace and then it ends another, but it never leaves. So I think I related to her in that aspect of how she went on that journey.”
For Garrett, who plays the eldest daughter, the mother-daughter dynamic hit close to home.
“I knew it would be important, but it took on a whole other meaning when I met Michelle,” the actress told Gold Derby. “Also, becoming a mother prior to that and having that depth in it. I just hadn’t worked as a mom before.”
Fox, who plays Preston’s brother, found comfort in both the landscape and his character’s occupation as a pilot.
“The scripts really touched me. It also takes place in a part of the world that I know pretty well. I grew up in northwestern Wyoming,” the Lost actor said on the panel. “All the imagery, I just was really moved by it. And it felt familiar, and it kind of felt like home. And it just felt soulful and full of heart.”
Fox added that he grew up fishing with his two brothers, “and this relationship with Kurt was something that I just felt very excited to do.”
Russell is also no stranger to ranch life, having moved to Colorado when he was 26.
“People were telling me, ‘Well, that’s the end of your working in the picture business and whatnot,” he told Gold Derby. “Actually, I was doing a lot of writing at that time, so I didn’t really care. I wasn’t really worried about it. And, as things worked out, it didn’t make any difference. And it was something that I was very, very happy that I did.”
“Later on, when I met Goldie [Hawn], I was really happy that she liked Colorado,” he added. “And then a couple of years later, we got this place together that we developed over the years, this ranch that we built and worked over the last, what, 40 years.”
While Pfeiffer remained tight-lipped about the upcoming sophomore season, Fox told Gold Derby that he’s “excited to see it” even though Paul won’t appear in any of the new episodes.
“I think Season 2 is going to be a little bit lighter and more humor involved,” he teased.
As for Abby and her budding relationship with Deputy Sheriff Van Davis (Ben Schnetzer), Garrett shared some insight.
“I think they’re two people that aren’t meant to be together, but are. And I think that they’re trying to find their way to each other. And whether it happens or not, it’s hard to say.
But they are trying.”
Chapman teased that Paige and her husband Russell’s (Patrick J. Adams) journey next season will involve “better footwear.”
“So they are starting to adjust to this new environment,” she said. “And I also will tease that I think they fall in love with it by the end.”
Russell promised that the next installment is “really good.”
Whereas the first season takes place over about a week, he noted that the “second season begins to open things up time-wise a little bit more, and you’ll see more of the people dealing with the difference between New York and Montana.”
“And I’ll be there too,” he added, “in her dreams.”
