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On June 4, the IndieWire Honors Spring 2026 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best television series. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the creators, artisans, and performers behind shows well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the Los Angeles event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.
After four decades of constant demand in movies and television, Michelle Pfeiffer’s range is astounding: from her three Oscar-nominated movies “Love Field,” “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” and “Dangerous Liaisons” to “Scarface,” “Frankie and Johnnie,” and her slinky turn as the whip-wielding Catwoman in “Batman Returns.” (When I brought that one up, Pfeiffer grinned and said, “That was such a dream come true.”)
This year, the recipient of our IndieWire Honors Vanguard Award seems to be peaking. She is competing in not just one Emmy race, but two. She stars in her husband David E. Kelly’s broad sex-work comedy “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” (on Apple TV) as Cheyenne, who is trying to put her Hooters past behind her with a new marriage while coping with an unexpected grandchild. And she’s also the magnificent grieving matriarch Stacy Clyburn in Western family drama “The Madison” (on Paramount TV+), created by Taylor Sheridan, in which she is reunited with her “Tequila Sunrise” costar Kurt Russell after 37 years.
While Pfeiffer knows she has chops, she still felt the challenges of both roles. “It was slightly daunting with ‘Margo,'” she said in a sunny office at PMC. “The character Cheyenne was so multifaceted, and, of all things, I did not want to disappoint my husband. And with ‘The Madison,’ I didn’t exactly know what I was getting into, because I hadn’t read a script. Of course, Taylor has an amazing track record.”
So Pfeiffer trekked to Texas to meet Sheridan. He told her, as she recalled: “This is a love story. And it’s not about, and then we find out that the husband was having an affair, or there’s some big dark secret. No, these people were deeply and madly in love for 50 years, and that’s the story I want to tell, and nobody has told that story.”
Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell in ‘The Madison’Courtesy of Chris Saunders / Paramount+But mainly “The Madison” is about a family dealing with grief, which is something everyone has had to cope with at one time. “It’s a story of broken dreams,” said Pfeiffer. “It’s a story of having to slowly and painstakingly rebuild your life after everything that you have known falls apart in a day.”
Usually Pfeiffer looks at a script before she commits to something. And usually Sheridan likes to write with his primary cast in place. They were at a standoff until Pfeiffer called the star of Sheridan’s “1923.” “I have so much respect for Helen Mirren,” said Pfeiffer. “I don’t know her at all, just from afar, and she gracefully and generously agreed to speak to me. She was glowing about the scripts, the productions and the whole experience, and how much she loved Montana.”
Of course, Pfeiffer checked out some of the massive Sheridan oeuvre, especially “1883” and “Lawman: Bass Reeves,” both directed by “The Madison” director Christina Alexandra Voros. “She’s brilliant,” said Pfeiffer. “Because she’s a cinematographer, she brings the character of Montana, which is maybe the most important character of the series, to the screen in such a beautiful and epic way. It’s just breathtaking.”
Viewers may be humming the glorious Western vistas, but it wasn’t fun to shoot. “We were out there surviving for three months together, out in the elements,” she said, “every day from sunrise to sunset. Wind storms would come up, and people are having to hold down the lights. And then it got bitter cold, and I was sitting in a river! You bond with people when you survive something like that. I can’t say it was fun, but it was a joyous experience.”
The cast were not unlike the spoiled rich city kids and their parents experiencing rugged Montana for the first time in Sheridan’s story. “We’re all fish out of water, and shell-shocked,” said Pfeiffer. “You get it. It’s on-screen.”
Michelle Pfeiffer at the PMC officesAnne ThompsonSheridan’s scripts posed a certain degree of difficulty. “He has a poetry to his writing, which sometimes can get tricky because it’s so beautiful and so poetic,” said Pfeiffer. “Those scenes you have to be careful that you’re not playing too far into the poetry. It has to be naturalistic. You have to ground it. And if you can hit it, it comes alive. It’s really beautiful.”
“The Madison” also switches tones on a dime, veering into broad comedy. “I have some funny moments,” said Pfeiffer, “but the out and out comedy is with the daughters, the laugh out loud stuff. It was again hard to stay within the confines of this woman who is still grieving. She may be pulled together at the moment, because grief comes in waves, and big waves, sometimes tsunamis.”
Of course Pfeiffer has had many losses in her life. “You don’t have to search real long and real hard to tap into that,” she said. “Especially when it’s a sudden and a tragic death, the shock of it suddenly shifts everyone’s perspective. It’s like you all of a sudden don’t have time for the bullshit that you’ve been putting up with, and there’s a truth in the way that people start to interact with each other, but it doesn’t last very long. I had it when my father died. There’s a purity. Everybody for a short period of time is behaving with each other in a pure and honest way, and I remember always thinking, ‘If I could just hold on to this.’ And you never can.”
Some of the most outrageous scenes are between Stacy, who likes to act out, and her forbearing therapist (Will Arnett). Whenever Pfeiffer questioned whether her character would actually say something, Sheridan would tell her, “Well, you know, Stacy isn’t really in her right mind right now,” she said, “which is actually good direction.”
While Sheridan clearly enjoys skewering New York, Pfeiffer doesn’t share his negative spin. “I love New York, and who knows where Stacy’s going to land?” Season 2 , which filmed last summer, is due in the fall. And Pfeiffer is still waiting to see advance scripts for Season 3, which is scheduled to shoot its six episodes in the spring of 2027.
Pfeiffer did two series in a year, first “The Madison,” then a few months later, “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” and then right back into the next season of “The Madison.” Pfeiffer came into “Margo” after Elle Fanning was cast as her daughter. The novel was laying on the counter in her kitchen. “I would walk by it,” she said. “Finally, I said to David one day, ‘What’s this book? Would I like it?’ He said, “Oh, yeah, it’s good. You’ll like it. Actually, we’re optioning it, and there’s a part in there that we all think you should play.'”
Michelle Pfeiffer and Elle Fanning in ‘Margo’s Got Money Troubles’Courtesy of Apple TVThen Pfeiffer fell in love with the book and the character of reluctant grandmother Cheyenne. But she had never worked with her husband before. “All these years I sat on the sidelines,” she said. “I was in envy of all of these other actors getting to speak his words, because boy can he write dialogue. I would turn to him every now and then: ‘I hope these actors realize how lucky they are to be saying these words.’ So I was excited about that.”
Given that Cheyenne takes up about ten pages in the book, Kelly expanded her role in the series, as a woman who makes babies cry. Pfeiffer went to town with hair extensions, loud makeup, and snap-on veneers.
“That’s all her armor in a way, right?,” Pfeiffer said. “She just feels so insecure. She felt insecure as a mother. She wasn’t ready to be a mother. She didn’t think she was a good mother. She did her best, and Margo turned out pretty darn well. I don’t think that she has a lot of innate maternal instincts, Cheyenne, and some people just don’t. Babies pick up on that, so every time she goes near the baby, the baby just starts crying.”
Pfeiffer can’t praise her costar Fanning enough. “She’s just magnificent in this. It’s like light is coming out of her,” she said.
Juggling two series changed Pfeiffer, she said. She used to carry her work with her everywhere. “It’s always here with me, I’m always thinking about it, and you’re on the weekend,” she said, “trying to prepare for the next week, and even when I’m out to dinner, it’s always on my shoulder. And I thought, ‘I don’t want to do that. I want to be present, I’m a grandmother now.’ I don’t want to miss it, and I don’t want to miss life either. I want to spend time with my friends and my family, and I want to travel, and when I’m not working — I love my job — I don’t want to be thinking about the job coming up.”
She continued, “I want to be present. And that shift was being less prepared. It’s showing up and being present, and also having an amazing cast to work with, and great directors, strong material. So it was an experiment for me, and it’s been great.”
It helped that these are two fascinating, mercurial, mature women. “They are two of the best parts I’ve ever had,” said Pfeiffer. “I never thought at this stage, at this age, that I would be having these opportunities to play complex, well-rounded, challenging characters.”
“Margo’s Got Money Troubles” is now streaming on Apple TV; “The Madison” is now streaming on Paramount+.
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