Elizabeth Marvel Didn’t Plan Any of This

Welcome to Always Great, a new Awards Insider column in which we speak with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this entry, Elizabeth Marvel talks about her work across a range of prestige TV shows, from Homeland and House of Cards to this year’s Love & Death and Mrs. Davis.

Elizabeth Marvel is proud to be the kind of actor who gets invited back. At the time of our conversation in May she was on the set of Presumed Innocent, another show from producer David E. Kelley, who wrote Marvel’s latest series, Love & Death. In a career like Marvel’s, which includes three TV series and a feature film this year alone, you have a lot of reunions. 

She’s mostly doing calmer work onscreen than what she started doing in New York theater in the early ’90s, when collaborations with directors like Ivo van Hove earned her a reputation, she says, for “extremism…physically radical work.” In Love & Death, for example, she plays the pastor of a suburban Texas church who is so trusted by parishioner Candy (Elizabeth Olsen) that Candy confides in her about a potential affair. Or on Mrs. Davis, a show whose dark comic tone is described by star Betty Gilpin as “No Country for old Looney Tunes,” Marvel portrays the imperious, dead-serious head of a global security agency. Then again, her character is also a woman who (accidentally!) shoots her young daughter with a crossbow. So the intensity did find her after all. 

Marvel got her start at Juilliard when she was 18, though she wasn’t the tailor-made theater kid you might expect: “I did one play in high school, poorly, and I didn’t like the people, and I didn’t like the drama scene,” she says. Perhaps that set her up well to blaze her own trail, working in New York theater at a time when “you lived on chili. It wasn’t like you had a fancy life, but you lived.” She did Broadway, performed Shakespeare at Canada’s Stratford Festival, and began one of her longest-running collaborations—her marriage to fellow actor Bill Camp, who has been her costar many times since. 

But as it does for so many New York theater actors, television eventually came calling. Her Juilliard teacher Michael Langham had advised her to do five years of stage work after graduation; when those five years were up, she says, “I was tired, and I saw people making a lot of money.” She landed on the CBS police procedural The District, an optimistic cop show starring Craig T. Nelson as a New York City police commissioner sent to Washington, DC, to fight corruption in the police force. The cast was an “island of misfit toys,” as Marvel calls it, including a very young Justin Theroux, Lynne Thigpen, and Jean Smart, who earned an Emmy nomination for the show’s first season. 

Marvel describes her role as no-nonsense detective Nancy Parras as being a “secretary cop,” meaning she was at her desk and in the background in many scenes in which she had no lines. But she used her time well. “I learned so much because I had to show up on set every day,” she says now. “I just talked to the crew every day, all the time, and learned so much.” She compares the switch from theater as going from playing violin to acoustic guitar: “You can kind of teach yourself to play the acoustic guitar and ask a lot of questions and talk to people.”

By then it was the early 2000s, and the beginning of what Marvel calls “this amazing age of long-form narrative that I wandered into at the right moment.” Her role in this era of television, as she sees it, is very specific: “They need water carriers like me to do the heavy lift, because there’s a lot of speeches that need to be made.” She has made plenty of TV speeches, particularly as a presidential candidate on House of Cards and then a villainous president on Homeland, but her characters aren’t all just steel spine. Take the woman of leisure she played on an episode of 30 Rock, luring Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon into a cabal of day-drinking, spa-going women who turn out to be running—you guessed it—a fight club.