Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell bring easy chemistry from real-life friendship to The Madison
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Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell attend Paramount+’s New York premiere of The Madison on March 9.Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
Seventy-four years. That’s the combined total of Michelle Pfeiffer’s marriage to producer David E. Kelley (32 years) and Kurt Russell’s relationship with Goldie Hawn (42 years).
I don’t know if the prolific television creator Taylor Sheridan was thinking about that longevity when he cast Pfeiffer and Russell in The Madison, his new, six-part Paramount+ series. But the actors certainly imbue their roles – Stacy and Preston Clyburn, privileged New Yorkers still in love after 39 years, with two adult daughters and two granddaughters – with that long-married energy.
“I was right for this, I brought the right baggage,” Russell said during a video interview with Pfeiffer last week. (The Pfeiffer/Russell relationship itself stretches back to at least 1987, when they made the steamy love-triangle film Tequila Sunrise, and they share an easy chemistry on screen and off.) “I’ve lived a good life. I have a great relationship, a full and long one I hope to continue. It was fun to bring that to Preston through osmosis.”
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L-R: Alaina Pollack as Macy Reese, Beau Garrett as Abigail Reese, Amiah Miller as Brigitte Reese, Michelle Pfeiffer as Stacy Clyburn, Patrick J. Adams as Russell McIntosh, and Elle Chapman as Paige McIntosh in The Madison.Emerson Miller/Paramount+/Supplied
Pfeiffer agreed: “One of the things I notice about really great couples – and I include my relationship in that – is the ease with which they speak to each other,” she said. “The honesty. The respect and reverence for each other. And the teasing, the ribbing that goes on. Stacy and Preston have that.”
It’s true, there are scads of stories about dysfunctional relationships, but few about functional ones; tons of tales about falling in love or breaking up, but few about the complex layers in the middle. It’s a genuine pleasure to watch Stacy and Preston get dressed together for an evening out, or talk in the bath about letting their daughters make their own mistakes. But of course Sheridan, who wrote all six episodes, swirls sorrow into that happiness – or it wouldn’t be a drama.
Stacy, a self-proclaimed “city mouse,” is content to patter around their palatial aerie in soft cashmeres, lunch with equally moneyed friends and do light charity work. Preston, a finance guy one-percenter, is easygoing but for one itch: Once a year he goes trout fishing with his brother Paul (Matthew Fox, Lost), who lives a cloistered but nature-revering existence in a hand-hewn cabin on Montana’s Madison River, where they “rough it” in the most Rustic Mood Board way possible.
Something big happens, I won’t spoil what, and the six episodes toggle between the recent past and the present, in which a family of spoiled Manhattanites “not designed to withstand tragedy” try to cope with one, in absolutely the wrong footwear for Montana.
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Michelle Pfeiffer as Stacy Clyburn in The Madison.Emerson Miller /Paramount +/Supplied
Sheridan, who is 55, is a film screenwriter (Sicario, Hell or High Water) and the creator of a staggering nine television series including Yellowstone and its spinoffs, many of which air concurrently.
The Madison is squarely situated in what I call his 21st-Century American Dream zeitgeist. It’s a place where the super-rich wear their wealth both lightly and aspirationally; but where the smartest and most admirable people are the working folk who live closest to the land in a mythic American West and know things no Easterner could know. This is great, because the hoity-toity get to learn rural wisdom yet still keep their fortunes.
In Sheridonia, nature is formidable, beautiful and not appreciated enough by knuckleheads who are soon schooled or transformed. It’s always sunrise or magic hour, and tall grasses perpetually wave in the wind while eagles soar overhead.
All six Madison’s were directed by Christina Alexandra Voros, who was also the cinematographer. That is rare and difficult to pull off, but Voros has now done it for 30 episodes of television: She worked her way up from a camera operator on Yellowstone season one to director on season three. On season four, Sheridan asked if she’d like to also shoot the episodes she directed, fulfilling a dream she’d expressed back in film school.
Along the way, Voros developed “a deep understanding of the way Taylor likes to tell stories,” she said in a separate video interview. “It feels like being fluent in a language.” The language of The Madison “is an elegy, a sonnet. It’s a confession of love for one’s family, for the land, for the places we think we come from and the places we may not yet realize we belong. It is full of love.”
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Matthew Fox as Paul Clyburn and Kurt Russell as Preston Clyburn in The Madison.Emerson Miller/Paramount+/Supplied
In this series and in Sheridonia writ large, the men are strong and laconic, the women are feisty and capable, and everyone tacitly feels that human gender roles perhaps work best when they don’t stray too far from those of the bull and the cow.
Preston likes to needle Stacy about that, Russell says: “He likes to quote from history, and be all, ‘Let’s call it like it is.’ But Stacy gets this great comeback – ‘You should write a book and call it How to Not Have Sex with Your Wife for a Month.’ That cracked me up.”
“That’s the tension that keeps Stacy and Preston going,” Pfeiffer says. “Relationships are strongest when you’re similar in the important ways – your values, morals, how you want to raise your kids. And different enough in other areas to keep it a little spicy so you don’t get bored. A lot of what Preston says is just trying to get to Stacy.” She turns to Russell. “You do that, Kurt, in life.”
“I do,” Russell says, grinning at her.
“On Tequila Sunrise you would say the most outrageous things,” Pfeiffer continues, turning fully to him, seeming to forget for a second she’s in an interview. “You’d get me going every time. You just like to get a reaction.”
“I do,” Russell says again.
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And bingo, there’s the best reason to watch The Madison: You get to gaze upon Pfeiffer and Russell, two of the greatest American faces ever to grace a screen.
It’s apt that Voros shoots them during magic hour, in that golden, lowering, end-of-day glow cinematographers love. Because Pfeiffer and Russell are the human embodiment of magic hour. She’s 67, he’s 74. He’s been doing this since age 11, she since age 20. They’ve seen a lot, and they’re still going. They are the ideal duo to represent The Madison’s tagline: “You will have as much life to live as you allow yourself.”
“Right around Goldie’s 50th birthday,” Russell says, “I started to realize, ‘The future is now.’ The Madison is a very adult show in that regard.”
“At our age you start to realize you have a finite amount of time left on this planet,” Pfeiffer says. “And you want to eat up the things that are meaningful to you as much as possible, and not waste time on things that aren’t important. It’s very liberating. Unfortunately, you start to lose people. Frequently.”
As she hears herself say “frequently” – such a matter-of-fact acknowledgment, in a tone so unvarnished – Pfeiffer cracks up, and Russell joins in. It’s the kind of unexpected laugh only old friends can share.
