Why 'The Madison' Was a Leap of Faith for Michelle Pfeiffer
Michelle Pfeiffer as Stacy Clyburn in 'The Madison.'
Emerson Miller/Paramount+
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[This story contains one major spoiler from the first episode of The Madison.]
At the beginning of 2024, Michelle Pfeiffer got a call from her agent that Taylor Sheridan — the prolific hitmaker behind the Yellowstone-verse — wanted to talk to her about a new series.
“I said, ‘Great, have him send the script,'” Pfeiffer recalls to The Hollywood Reporter. “They said, no, there’s no script. You have to go to Texas and meet him, and he would like to talk you through the story and your character.”
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So Pfeiffer hopped on a plane to Texas and found herself sitting with Sheridan at his Bosque Ranch outside Weatherford, Texas, discussing what would become the role of Stacy Clyburn in The Madison, the standalone Paramount+ series (not in the Yellowstone-verse) that Sheridan has described as his most intimate work yet.
“He had a general outline, an overview of a story of this affluent family based in New York who really don’t want for anything. And tragedy strikes. It fractures the family. They end up in Montana trying to recover. And it’s tender and visceral and unexpectedly comical at times. Ultimately, they are pulled back together in ways that they never anticipated,” says Pfeiffer of their conversation.
She says she was told very little else in terms of specifics, including more details about her character, Stacy. Then she left.
“He wanted to know who Stacy was before he started writing. I wanted to know who Stacy is before I committed. And so we went back and forth like that for a little while, and it became clear to me I wasn’t going to win this battle,” she says with a laugh. “So I asked Helen Mirren to speak to me about her experience [with 1923].”
Mirren was one of Sheridan’s many A-list lures to television for the Yellowstone prequel 1923, where she played Dutton matriarch Cara Dutton for two seasons. “I have to know something concrete about this guy, this project,” Pfeiffer says of what she asked Mirren. “And she just glowed; she couldn’t say enough nice things. She said the scripts were great, the productions were perfect. She was having the time of her life; she loved Montana. So I took a big leap of faith and I committed. I thought, ‘Well, the guy has a pretty darn good track record.'”
Pfeiffer, who will soon be seen in the Apple TV series Margo’s Got Money Troubles, said that when The Madison came along she had been wanting to do something in television. “I’d been watching all this amazing work being done, and getting really envious!” she says. So, she committed and came on board.
Filming on The Madison didn’t begin until September 2024, and Pfeiffer didn’t get a script until about four weeks before they started shooting.
“That was new territory for me,” she admits. “This idea of starting and not getting the script until a month before we started shooting. I always prep for months in advance. You look at a script and chart it all out, what the journey of your character is. Here, you don’t know what the journey of your character is because you only get a couple scripts at a time. So I was nervous.”
Pfeiffer credits Yellowstone veteran Christina Voros, who directed all six episodes of The Madison season one, for helping her through Sheridan’s process. “She had to do a lot of hand-holding with me, and I learned to trust her immediately,” says Pfeiffer. “In our initial conversations, I think she thought, ‘What have I gotten into with this one?’ (Laughs.) It was a complete and utter joy being directed by her, and I know the entire cast felt that way.”
But that wasn’t the Oscar-nominee’s only challenge once filming began. Sheridan wanted Kurt Russell for the part of her onscreen husband, but when production began on The Madison, Russell was in production on his other series for Apple, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
From left: Kurt Russell as Preston Clyburn with Matthew Fox as Paul Clyburn.
Photo Credit: Emerson Miller/Paramount+
The Madison tells the story of the New York City Clyburn family, led by Pfeiffer’s matriarch, Stacy. As the first episode that released on March 14 revealed, Stacy’s husband, Preston —