In Reunited, Awards Insider hosts a conversation between two Emmy contenders who have collaborated on a previous project.

Midway through The Good Wife’s run, recurring star Renée Elise Goldsberry joined a workshop of an unknown new musical called Hamilton. This was in 2014, when the Carnegie Mellon and USC graduate had become a reliable presence on CBS’s legal drama as Geneva Pine, a whip-smart assistant DA. Goldsberry was one of only a handful of guest stars who’d go on to appear in each of The Good Wife’s seven seasons, operating under the radar while holding her own against heavyweights like Julianna Margulies, Josh Charles, and Christine Baranski.

“I just remember being like, Who is this beautiful, utterly poised young actress?” Baranski recalls. “I didn’t know your work, but you were unflappable and totally prepared, and it was a wonderful character.”

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She’s speaking directly to Goldsberry over Zoom, some 15 years after they first met. Baranski herself had come into The Good Wife as an icon of both stage and screen, having won her first of two Tonys way back in 1984 for The Real Thing and an Emmy just over a decade later for the sitcom Cybill. (She’d go on to play her Good Wife role of Diane Lockhart for 13 years overall, later leading spin-off series The Good Fight.) Goldsberry exited the show well on her way to a similar status: She was a newly minted Tony nominee for Hamilton when The Good Wife ended, ultimately winning that award and receiving her first prime-time Emmy nod a few years later for Disney+’s film version of the groundbreaking musical.

Both are back in the Emmy conversation this season for transformative newer roles: Goldsberry as the fiercely—and, at times, delusionally—determined ’90s girl-group star Wickie Roy in Netflix’s sharp comedy Girls5eva, and Baranski as the stubborn and crafty socialite Agnes van Rhijn in HBO’s period drama The Gilded Age. For these two Broadway regulars, their journeys between TV and the stage have been complex—if also more similar than they ever could’ve expected.

Christine Baranski: At the time you were working on The Good Wife, you were doing a workshop of a musical nobody had heard of. [Laughs] Did you ever think you were going to be in probably the greatest musical hit of all time?

Renée Elise Goldsberry: No! Later, there were all these extras around and they were like, “Renée, do you think you can get me in at the Public [Theater]? What do I have to do, Renée? I really want to do a play!” [Laughs] And I remember thinking, Who am I? But I remember the day you came to see the show, how much love you gave me downstairs in the basement of the Public Theater, in the dressing room. I’m so mad because I lost my phone after that day, but I had a really great picture of us. You gave me so much love, girl.

Baranski: You were brilliant, and it was just an unbelievable thing to see.

Goldsberry: I was reminiscing on you and your career even before The Good Wife, shocked at how many similarities we had that I wasn’t aware of at the time. One of them is your history at the Public Theater in Shakespeare in the Park, because that was my breakout as well. I feel like I have the great privilege of having followed in your pretty phenomenal footsteps.

Baranski: Well, you’re kind to say that. I remember the first play I did at the Public Theater. That to me was, Well, now I’m a New York actress. I’ve made it. It was off-Broadway. It was Shakespeare in the Park, James Lapine directing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I still remember it as the happiest theater experience of my life. What did you do first?

Goldsberry: I did Two Gentlemen of Verona, but I did a musical version of it. I had been on Broadway before—I had been in The Lion King—but it was definitely a breakout because it was a time I got reviewed. I got this awesome review by Ben Brantley, and it felt like it gave me the profile to be a part of original shows. [Hamilton writer] Lin-Manuel Miranda and [director] Tommy Kail talk about being kids just out of college in the audience when I was in the park. Who knew it was my audition for Hamilton many years later?

Baranski: And you know what? That was like my Shakespeare in the Park! Lapine then wanted me to audition for Sunday in the Park With George for a workshop production. I went in and I sang—I was terrified, but sang for Steve [Sondheim]. I got the job, and who was in the audience on the final workshop night but Mike Nichols? He wanted me to audition for The Real Thing, and The Real Thing was like my Hamilton. Not as big, of course, but a big, fat Broadway success with all the Tony Awards, and it never got any better than that.

I didn’t go to television until my early 40s, and I did it reluctantly. I almost backed out before I had to sign the paper because I was still doing this Hal Prince workshop that might’ve gone to Broadway.

Goldsberry: And what happened? It didn’t work, so you did a television show?

Baranski: Right before I signed the paper to do a show called Cybill, Hal’s number two guy gave us the word: “No, Hal has no plans in the near future for this musical.” So I took the plunge and the rest, as they say, is history, because Cybill then just completely changed my life. Suddenly, I was a TV actress and won an Emmy, and my God, I have worked for CBS for all of those years.

Goldsberry: Didn’t you also do soap operas at some point? Because that’s a New York actor thing.

Baranski: I did a few. It wasn’t my thing, having to learn a script overnight. I remember once playing a very rich lady—I went on to play a lot of rich ladies—and my whole purpose as a character was to present the new plotline, so it was nothing but exposition. Who was divorcing? Who was remarrying? It was just mind-numbing. Did you?

Goldsberry: Yes. No one wanted to hire me, and so I left New York to go to LA. Somebody told me, “No matter how talented you are, you’re not going to get a lead in a Broadway show unless you’re a television actress or a soap opera star. So I tried to get something to happen in my career. It’s ridiculous—and ironic, because I did end up getting cast in The Lion King from Los Angeles. It brought me back to New York City. I got cast on a soap opera, and in rehearsal one day, I heard about Kathleen Marshall directing Two Gents in the park, and all the actors in soap operas were theater actors—they were like, “Oh my God, you have to go to that audition.” Then I got the job.

Goldsberry: I love your show so much because I just sit up in my house and see all of the theater stars on my television. You’re all theater stars!

Baranski: An embarrassment of riches. I mean, COVID was horrifying and horrible, but it made all of these great theater actors available. The theater was shut down and we became this family. It was like a repertory company of all of these greats.

Goldsberry: I feel the same way, actually. Being in Girls5eva in New York City, it was the same thing. It was 2020, and I got this call from Tina Fey and Meredith Scardino to do the show. I didn’t understand the title. I was sitting at home promoting Hamilton on Zoom for Disney+, and I read the script and just spit-take laughed out loud. It was so funny and so brilliant and so much music—and with Sara Bareilles, who is also a theater girl.

Baranski: You guys are great together.

Goldsberry: So it’s this wonderful combination of theater actors and comic actors. But I literally thought, They’re putting a show together where they are going to let us onto a set without quarantining us. I’m going to do it! It was 2020, and they said, “You don’t have to quarantine. You just have to test every day,” and that was easier with my kids. So I took this job. I thought it was a COVID job. And here I am in 2024 with one of the greatest jobs I’ve ever had in my life.

Baranski: We had to get swabbed before we got on the set. We had to be tested and we had to wear masks, and that was so hard. The great thing about theater actors is, you can throw anything at them. We’re just resilient animals, and I wouldn’t trade my training and my years of working in that theater for anything. When I did Cybill, you have to do scenes in a sitcom, over and over, take after take, for an audience. My producers called me a Xerox machine, getting the same line reading and the same quality of laugh. I said, “Well, that’s what we do in the theater. We repeat it, we find out how to do it best.”

Goldsberry: After we shot the pilot of Girls5eva, Tina Fey came into the hair and makeup trailer just to say, “So we’re really thinking about this more like Saturday Night Live,” meaning: We don’t have time with this production to spend a lot of time trying to work on this and get it right. We’ve got to move really, really fast. That’s another thing that made me feel, Well, thank God I come from the world of theater. Not that we don’t get a lot of rehearsal, but we definitely are always expected to get up on our feet the very first time and pull something off, and that’s been tremendously helpful to me on this show.

Baranski: Now I have to do Zoom readings of The Gilded Age for season three, because we’re all over the place. Carrie Coon is still in Thailand [filming The White Lotus]; I’m in production in Munich. We’re going to read the first two episodes of Gilded Age on Tuesday, so we all have to Zoom up. And what’s really troublesome is young actors having to do Zoom auditions.

Goldsberry: They’ve asked me to do it. It’s not pretty, Christine. It’s not pretty.

Baranski: Well, I just don’t like the virtual world much at all.

Goldsberry: I was grateful to have a job. At that stage in my career as an actor, I felt that my job was to be the Xerox machine that Christine described. Playing lawyers, there’s a lot of technical jargon. Our brains have to know how to keep a lot in and say a lot. Courtroom scenes, oh my God. To shoot a courtroom scene, right, Christine? It’s a 12-hour day. Sometimes they block-shoot, and it might be the end of the day where you have to say a lot of long speeches. I thought I would be invited back if I never had to slow down the production. That’s actually not theater training; that’s soap opera training!

Baranski: You were utterly unflappable. I’ve seen the best of them go down on Friday nights where the brain just stops…. You play the hand you’re dealt, but I just think, in terms of our careers, we’ve done comedy, we’ve done drama, we’ve done musicals. Sometimes I would learn my lines as Diane Lockhart by singing them—having a rhythm to it or a slight melody, you’re able to just physiologically remember better. It’s musicalized.

Goldsberry: It was such a perfect job. The only thing that I did not like about it is that they didn’t have me back every day. I loved that experience so much. I loved that cast so much. I did not watch the show until it was off the air because I didn’t want to be emotionally attached to when they would call me. [Laughs] I felt like it was like a man that called you only sometimes, that you wanted to marry. You know what I’m saying? I don’t want to think about him all the time. I don’t want to get involved in the drama.

Baranski: We’re very lucky because since COVID and the strike and pulling back on money, now they’re pulling back content. We’re part of a system still from the way it was, because I think things are moving in a direction where they just may not be as adventurous or have very large casts. The business is in a bit of a free-fall now. Those of us who are actual working film or television actors at present are a very, very lucky group.

Goldsberry: Can I add this one thing? We started talking about our children and our families [before recording], and that’s just another area that I looked to you with such reverence. I’m so inspired by your ability to raise children and grandchildren, and never miss a beat in terms of living your calling as an actor.

Baranski: If I can offer words of comfort or wisdom or just say to another fellow actress: “Hey, I’ve been there. I know how hard this is. This is killing you and there are no shortcuts. You’re pulled in two directions, and you cannot be on a set at 11 o’clock at night and be home at bedtime. You can’t do it.”

Goldsberry: I always just want to say: It’s messy, it’s hard, it’s difficult—but worth it.

Baranski: You need help.

Goldsberry: And you can forgive yourself.

This interview has been edited and condensed.