Kathy Bates Says ‘Matlock’ Will Be Her Last Role Before Retiring: ‘My Final Dance’

When Kathy Bates read the script for “Matlock” in January she wasn’t exactly interested in the role, she told the New York Times in an interview published Sunday. She was ready to retire, but the script paused those plans — though not for good. Bates revealed that once the show is finished, so is she. “This will be my final dance,” the actress told the outlet.

The CBS series has, perhaps surprisingly, become an outlet for what she has left to release. “Everything I’ve prayed for, worked for, clawed my way up for, I am suddenly able to be asked to use all of it,” she explained. “And it’s exhausting.”

Bates seems to be an actor who is incredibly aware of what she feels and how deeply she feels it. When she and writer Alexis Soloski met for dinner, the actress said, “Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain. Do I have the right to feel this pain? When I was given so much?”

She tried to build a career in Hollywood in her twenties but it didn’t stick (“At first the move was demoralizing. She was often told she wasn’t pretty enough to succeed,” Soloski noted), but her career took a turn in 1990 when she earned the part of Annie Wilkes in “Misery” — and she won an Oscar.

Bates worked steadily throughout the following years and experienced another wave of success when she was cast in Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story.” She was ready to leave it all behind when “Matlock” came around. The actress admitted that she identifies with her character, Matty.

“Maybe on some deep level that’s why I was attracted to this,” she said.

The new “Matlock” is of course based on the Andy Griffith-led series of the same name, which ran from 1986 to 1995.

You can read the interview with Kathy Bates at the New York Times.

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