Matlock’s Skye P. Marshall Didn’t Want Olympia to Know Matty’s Secret

Matlock is building up to unveil Matty’s secret identity, but not everyone — including Skye P. Marshall — is ready for the reveal.

“I did not want to know her secret until season 3, to be honest with you,” Marshall, 43, joked during an exclusive interview with Us Weekly. “I wanted Matty Matlock to just carry on with her shenanigans and her MacGyver techniques.”

Marshall, who plays Olympia on the CBS series, would have preferred to see Kathy Bates‘ character come clean on her own instead of being caught.

“The audience has got to witness what this has been doing to this woman and the impact that she has on everyone around her — and if she can see it or not. Does she see what her goal is and how that is contributing to other people’s pain — like with her husband, Edwin, and grandson Alfie,” she noted. “I wanted Olympia to stay laser-beam focused on her goal of accomplishment.”

Matlock, which premiered in September 2024, became an overnight hit in large part due to its innovative storytelling. The series follows a wealthy retired lawyer named Madeline Kingston (Bates) who pretends to be a poor widower named Matty Matlock to get a job at a firm. It’s eventually revealed that Matty thinks someone at the company is complicit in the opioid epidemic that resulted in her daughter’s death.

Olympia is one of the suspects until she and Matty start to form a bond. Their friendship starts to chip away at Matty’s commitment to her mission, but Olympia is not aware of Matty’s suspicions as she remains focused on her own personal and professional challenges.

“I had the same trials that Olympia had. There was so much familiarity there that I have found myself personally in that pursuit of happiness in the industry of acting. I just couldn’t quite see everything else that was happening around me because I was so focused on the goal,” the actress recalled. “I wanted to share that same challenge with Olympia. The fact that she gets up and she’s always put together because she has to make sure that she’s a step ahead of everyone and she also has to figure out how to take care of her family.”

Marshall continued: “I don’t think she even knows that Matty Matlock would want her to know or need her to know. I was just going to wait for that to happen. And our writers did not tell us anything, so at every table read, I was just like, ‘Is this the episode that she finds out? Nope, not this episode.’”

While viewers see Matty’s reasoning, Marshall has preferred to keep herself in the dark.

“When I would go through the script, I would skip over any conversations that Matty had with her family. Olympia does not know that universe. She doesn’t know Matty’s intentions or her goals. I wanted to do my best to stay focused on who Olympia is,” she explained. “I think Matty has created such a web of lies that Olympia has no reason to expect her to be someone else. Olympia wouldn’t investigate any further.”

Marshall went on to praise Matlock for balancing a case of the week with more personal stories for each character.

 

“[Creator] Jennie Snyder Urman is an incredible writer and she has such a unique way to create such a delicious mystery where you will cry and you will laugh in the same episode,” she told Us. “She has a way of making people feel more connected to characters that they’re just getting to know. That’s not easy these days, so when everybody shows up every week to tune in — a large fraction of that turnout is because the writing is just so fantastic.”

After sharing the screen with Bates, 76, for an entire season, Marshall gushed over her costar, adding, “She is so unpredictable. When she performs, I only do my best to not act and just be present with her because I know that she’s giving the editors such a variety to choose from. It challenges me to also expand the variation of responses that I give. It is phenomenal that we can keep the same language on the page but change the tone and change the pace. That chemistry is what the audience is really hooking onto.”

Marshall concluded: “Then you have the overarching mystery that keeps the audience hooked in this back half of new episodes leading to the season finale. There’s the momentum of both Olympia getting to her own personal goal of making it to the top of the food chain at the law firm and Matty figuring out who’s responsible for hiding evidence. It gets amped all the way up where you see Matty and Olympia just running full throttle toward our goals until you get to what is going to be an insane outcome.”

Matlock airs on CBS Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET and new episodes stream the next day on Paramount+.