Perfect fit
As legal drama Suits continues to enjoy a Netflix-led revival, actor Sarah Rafferty speaks to DQ about her star turn as Donna Paulsen, why the series was the answer to her prayers and how she sought to protect the fan-favourite character across its nine-season run.
Across a 25-year career in television, US star Sarah Rafferty has collected an enviable array of on-screen credits, from early appearances in Law & Order and Six Feet Under to Grey’s Anatomy and Chicago Med.
She’s currently a series regular in Netflix drama My Life with the Walter Boys, an adaptation of Ali Novak’s novel about a teenage girl who moves from Manhattan to rural Colorado after she is taken in by the Walter family. Season two is set to launch on August 25.
But Rafferty is best known for her long-running role as the witty, smart and fiercely loyal Donna Paulsen in USA Network legal drama Suits, which originally ran for nine seasons from 2011 to 2019 and has found a new audience following its launch on Netflix in 2023.
In fact, with Suits and My Life with the Walter Boys both shooting in Canada, in Toronto and Calgary respectively, Rafferty jokes that she’s worked more outside the US than in it. But at a time when television commissioning is falling after a decade of ‘Peak TV,’ she can feel a change in her hometown of LA as the business looks to settle down after a downturn sparked by the streamers’ search for profitability, as well as Covid and the 2023 writer and actor strikes.
“I feel lucky. I feel really lucky that I am busy. I’m thanking my lucky stars,” she tells DQ. “I love this business, I love collaboration and I love the wacky other members of the circus that we get to interact with. So I love my job. I do worry about the future. I worry about young people today getting in. It’s not a world I can necessarily give them a ton of advice about because it’s different. They need to forge a really different kind of path than I did over the last 30 years.”
Rafferty found her feet in the business through what she describes as the “typical” entry route: she attended acting school, performed a showcase to get an agent and then started auditioning for plays in New York City.
“You don’t get paid a lot to be in a play, so you would subsidise that with a commercial if you were lucky, or an episode of Law & Order if you worked in New York. That would help sustain you,” she says. “It’s different today because we don’t have the kinds of residuals we had with legacy TV. There have been a lot of changes in terms of how to sustain yourself as an artist. But I think artists are creative and they figure it out. It just requires some hustle.”
The star looks back on her early appearances in Law & Order, Six Feet Under, The Practice, Brothers & Sisters and Charmed with “so much affection.” And she was able to reunite with Six Feet Under and Brothers & Sisters star Rachel Griffiths in June this year when they both served as jury members at the Monte-Carlo TV Festival.
“It was really fun to connect with her and be like, ‘I guested with you on this thing 20 years ago.’ She actually did remember Brothers & Sisters because we had so many fun conversations in our downtime,” Rafferty says. “We have so much downtime, and that’s what’s so great about the communities we form when we’re working. We have our water-cooler discussions just sitting around waiting for the lights to go up.”
But as wonderful as it was to jump between numerous shows as a guest actor, Rafferty “craved” something that felt more like a home and a place to develop a character over many episodes and seasons. So when Suits came around, “that was an answer to my prayers, in many ways,” she says – though the cast would have to wait each year to find out if it would continue for another season.
“I loved it and it was a dream of mine,” she says. “I almost was afraid to dream of that because it seemed like rare air to have the opportunity to be on a show for that long. We never knew each year necessarily that we were going to have another year, but then a decade happened.”
Created by Aaron Korsch, Suits is set inside a fictional New York law firm where Mike Ross (Patrick J Adams), a genius college dropout with a photographic memory, becomes an associate for star attorney Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht). As Harvey and Mike win lawsuits and close cases for their clients, the show also follows the personal and professional dilemmas facing those at the firm.
Rafferty plays Harvey’s legal secretary and confidante Donna, with Rick Hoffman as neurotic financial lawyer Louis Litt, Meghan Markle as ambitious paralegal Rachel Zane and Gina Torres as the firm’s commanding managing director Jessica Pearson.
Reading the scripts for the first time, Rafferty felt like she could “hear” the characters and immediately understood them from an archetypical point of view. “It seemed so clearly drawn on the page for me, so I was really excited about that,” she says. “There was a pace in our pilot that was amazing. It’s propulsive, and it felt that way when I was reading it.”
She also had “intel” from close friend Macht – who encouraged her to audition for the role of Donna – that there would be a chance for the character’s position in the Universal Cable Productions series to expand over later seasons.
That was never a guarantee, but whether by design or through the strength and charm of Rafferty’s performance, Donna became a fan favourite and indispensable to the show’s legal firm, which goes through numerous name changes as named partners come and go. Donna becomes Louis’s legal secretary in season five after a breakdown in Donna and Harvey’s relationship, and later becomes the firm’s COO.
“Gabriel and I, who had known each other since 1993, we had an energy immediately as we’d known each other forever, so that was an important element,” she says. “Essentially, she began as a functional character – the function in the piece was to illuminate the softer sides of this guy [Harvey] who’s a little tough on the exterior, and she softened him. Then you could see in private moments he had with her who he was, and then you could learn more about her.
“The affection that came for her was, I think, a lot of women [who] may see themselves reflected in her. I hope that’s what it is. It seems to me from the feedback I get that they do. Most of us are more in that position in our lives, being the person behind the scenes, and it was really fun that they made her really high on the totem pole [in terms of influence], even though she was technically low on the totem pole.”
Rafferty continues: “She was maybe a little bit of our interior fantasy. I wish in my personal life that I had that kind of wit to say the right thing at the right time, and that unflappability, that complete lack of intimidation by people, knowing who you are and what your superpowers are, and that you’re bringing value to every room you walk into. It was really fun to play that.”
As co-stars including Torres, Adams and Markle left (and sometimes returned) through the course of the series, Rafferty remained an ever-present cast member, appearing in all 134 of the show’s episodes. The actor describes that journey as a “great privilege,” but recalls a time when she began to fight for her character off-screen in order to “protect” Donna from any changes that might have seemed out of character.
“What’s really important on TV is that there is drama and conflict. [But] it’s our job as actors to keep the continuity of who our character is true throughout,” she says. “So there were times when I had to find my voice to really speak up about that in certain situations. Because of the audience response and a lot of women who were responding to Donna, I felt really protective of her integrity.”
One example is when the “women of Suits” – also among the recurring cast were Amanda Schull (as Katrina Bennett), Aloma Wright (Gretchen Bodinski), Rachael Harris (Sheila Sazs), Katherine Heigl (Samantha Wheeler) and Christina Cole (Dr Paula Agard) – featured in scenes together. In a show that isn’t short of confrontation, whether across a courtroom or a boardroom, its female stars were “very careful to make sure that conflict was handled in a way that can never seem catty between these women, because these women were incredibly smart and ambitious and supportive of each other,” Rafferty says. “They were ultimately on a team. They were in extreme situations where there, of course, has to be conflict, but we were protective of our characters in that way.”
Notably, the 2016 US presidential election, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, prompted Rafferty to ask about how Donna might emerge from Harvey’s shadow. “It was hard for some of us to recognise that we were going to have to wait to see a woman sit in that seat in the White House,” she says. “I did have a conversation with our creator about, ‘Is there a world where Donna can come out from behind the man?’ It’s important that we have the Jessica Pearsons to look at on TV so women can see themselves sitting in those positions. And I was like, ‘What can we do with Donna?’ I don’t think he necessarily did this because of that conversation, but he did come back with a storyline where she became a partner and became COO.”
More important to Rafferty than Donna’s storylines was the fact Suits gave her the TV home and family she had been looking for since those early guest appearances. “I just wanted to be a part of a thing that meant something to people,” she says, having heard stories of families who would watch the show together, and of people who went to law school after being inspired by its characters. “Whatever it is, you found meaning and I got to be a little chunk of your life? That’s so cool.”
In the past few years, Rafferty has seen the show find a whole new audience on Netflix, providing viewers with the kind of long-running series that are more commonly associated with traditional US broadcast networks but have seemingly been craved by viewers following the explosion of limited dramas on streaming services.
According to Nielsen ratings, Suits was the most streamed series of 2023 in the US, with 57.7 billion minutes of viewing across Netflix and Peacock.
“It was crazy, that was crazy,” Rafferty exclaims. “That was hard to compute because they’re throwing numbers at you and, what…? You need to draw that out for me. I can’t understand what that means.
“We had a lovely audience the first time around and now some of those people have kids who are old enough to be watching it for the first time, and their parents now can watch it with them for the second time. It’s bringing them together just for fun, for escapism, for whatever they’re getting out of it.”
Looking back, Rafferty is thankful to the numerous co-stars she worked with across Suits’ nine-season run for helping to shape her as an actor, enhancing through “osmosis” the skills she has developed over her career.
“I feel like I learned a lot from my friends,” she says. “More than ever, being on something for that long with people is just knowing [it’s about] the thing that’s happening between us. It’s not your side and my side, it’s what we find together. So you bring as much preparation as you can, you let it go and you become present to a new thing that’s happening here. That’s what I think keeps me coming back and wanting to continue to be an actor in a time when it’s hard to be an actor.”
Rafferty wants to carry on working with new actors and directors and to “understand more perspectives.” She would also love to produce her own series and has ambitions to direct, though that will have to fit around her other role as a mother-of-two.
She’s now also rewatching Suits from the beginning for the first time for a podcast, Sidebar: A Suits Watch Podcast, which she hosts with Adams. “The most surprising element of it is how much compassion I have for the younger version of myself, because it was a journey and I’m on the other side of that,” she says. “I’m an a older, wiser gal. And seeing the younger version of myself, I’m just like, ‘Oh, you’ve come a long way.’”
So would she have any advice for that younger Rafferty? “I wish I could have told her to relax,” she adds. “It’s going to be OK.”
Like Suits? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
White Collar: The world’s most creative con man escapes from a maximum-security prison by walking out of the front door to find his lost love, before the FBI tracks him down and uses him as a consultant to catch other elusive criminals.
The Good Wife: A political drama that centres on a wife and mother who must assume full responsibility for her family and re-enter the workforce after her husband’s very public sex and political corruption scandal lands him in jail.
The Practice: David E Kelley’s legal drama focusing on the partners and associates of a Boston law firm that deals with high-profile cases that force the attorneys to choose between legal ethics and personal morality.
RELATED CONTENT
Marshall’s law
Following the debut season of CBS procedural Matlock, star Skye P Marshall reflects on updating the classic legal drama and working with Kathy Bates, and explains why she’d like to see a series based on US immigration agency ICE.
High performance
After decades in Hollywood, Famke Janssen returns to her native language for Netflix’s Amsterdam Empire. She tells DQ how the role reconnected her with her past, and looks ahead to what the future may hold.
Robin Wright’s Girlfriend experience
With her new series The Girlfriend launching on Prime Video later this year, Robin Wright discusses her journey from acting to directing, reveals who predicted House of Cards would be a game-changer for TV and explains why AI will never replace actors.
tagged in: My Life with the Walter Boys, Netflix, Sarah Rafferty, Suits, Universal Cable Productions