Calista Flockhart, 'Ally McBeal' Cast Reunites at the 2023 Emmy Awards
The 75th annual Primetime Emmy Awards stage that night became the offices of law firm Cage and Fish — and the site of a Ally McBeal meeting.
Calista Flockhartwho played the title character, took to the Peacock Theater stage in Los Angeles on Monday, January 15, along with former costars Greg Germann, Peter MacNicol And Gil Bellows.
“I know I drank too much water [and] I had to put my Spanx back on,” Flockhart said in a voiceover from a bathroom set, mimicking her ADR from the OG series. “I look good.”
Germann, 65, MacNicol, 69, and Bellows, 56, then emerged from different stalls and the group began dancing a conga line. After host Anthony Anderson ordered the men to leave the stage, but Flockhart stayed to present the leading man in a drama series Succession'S Kieran Culkin.
“I loved working with Peter, Greg and Gil and I still do,” says Flockhart. “The entire Ally McBeal cast was so talented, it was groundbreaking, revolutionary [and] introduced us to a dancing baby and [a] unisex bathroom.”
Ally McBeal aired between 1997 and 2002, and starred Flockhart, now 59, as a young lawyer working at Boston's Cage and Fish, the firm co-owned by her former classmate Richard Fish (German). Her ex-boyfriend Billy Thomas (Bellows) also worked at the firm, which led to a lot of drama.
“I had a great appreciation for Ally's character and the uniqueness of the writing and the hallucinations and the voiceover and all these wonderful things that I had never seen before,” Flockhart recalled. The Hollywood Reporter in September 2017. “One of the things I thought was so special about Ally was that she wasn't an ingénue; she was quirky, eccentric, intelligent, a work in progress. And she was stubborn, whether she was right or not.”
She continued: “She was the odd one out, just like everyone else. Usually the central character in a play, series or film is often the sensible person and that is the point of contact for the audience. So if you make the main character goofy, strange, and just as eccentric as everyone else, it's risky because the audience doesn't have that person to latch onto. I loved it.”
The 2023 Primetime Emmy Awards saw some of TV's biggest stars emerge after months of anticipation. A-listers flocked to the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Monday, January 15, for the 75th annual awards ceremony, hosted by Anthony Anderson. The nominations were announced in July 2023, two months before the Emmys were initially scheduled to take place […]
In the final of Ally McBealAlly quit her job at Cage and Fish and decided to move to New York City to reconnect with her long-lost biological daughter, Maddie (Hayden Panettiere).
Ally McBeal, which lasted five seasons, received 34 Emmy nominations during its run. The show won its only Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1999.
“The Emmy is proof of that David [E. Kelley]'s writing and a talented cast that worked well together,” Flockhart added THR. “The evening was very exciting and I felt very proud, happy and honored to be part of the show. It was incredible. They couldn't decide if the show was a drama or a comedy because it didn't really fit into any category. I thought that was groundbreaking at the time.”
Ally McBeal also played a leading role Jane Krakowski, Lucy Liu, Portia de Rossi, Robert Downey Jr., Lisa Nicole Carson And Courtney Thorne-Smith.