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'Suits' creator talks 'Pound of Flesh' (and what's next)
By Mandi Bierly on Jul 16, 2014 at 10:00PM
Spoiler alert! If you haven’t seen this week’s episode of Suits, “Pound of Flesh,” stop reading now. Creator Aaron Korsh talks about the “guns-down” hour that gives Sean Cahill (Neal McDonough) and Charles Forstman (Eric Roberts) more ammunition.
Mike didn’t really want to get in bed with Forstman, so he hadn’t officially taken his money yet. In the end, Forstman went behind Mike’s back and got Jonathan to accept it—twisted—and was like, “We’re partners, even if you don’t want to be.” Tell me about casting Eric Roberts. As a viewer, you almost feel like Forstman could knock off Mike at any moment.
First of all, as you know, I’m a big Justified fan. I had seen him in Justified last season, and [1985's] The Coca-Cola Kid is one of my favorite movies. We thought, “He’s a different way to go.” He’s a great actor that’s not overexposed, and we thought, “Let’s see what he brings to this Forstman character.” And he has a menacing quality to him that feels different from most other characters we’ve seen. He feels like a guy that enjoys manipulating people. You might have felt that this is just a one-dimensional bad guy, but he really feels like he brings an enjoyment—a little bit of a sadistic quality, but in a believable way. We’re very happy with his stuff to date.
Will Forstman be a big part of the season moving forward?
He’s involved moving forward, no doubt about it. He complicates Mike’s life, and Harvey’s life, in fun ways.
Cahill now thinks that Mike and Harvey could be in cahoots. Is that the next evolution of Cahill’s attack?
Yes. You’ve got Mike and Harvey in this battle for this company, and now you have someone else coming in and suspecting them of colluding on this deal. And they’re both doing things that are skirting the edge of legality and ethics and what have you to win. As we see, Jessica and Harvey have to concoct a way to buy this stock without buying it on Logan’s behalf—and that’s not colluding with Mike, but it’s doing something illegal. You have someone that’s all of a sudden going to look at them—it just throws a big kink into the battle and can change who’s got the upper hand. So the investigation and the takeover battle are starting to affect each other going forward.
The stuff between Donna and Louis was great, as always. Did you just want to get Rick Hoffman into that outfit when Louis joined Donna’s production of The Merchant of Venice for one night only?
[Laughs] I can’t quite remember, but once we got that idea, it took about five minutes to come up with that whole story because it was so much fun. Its first incarnation was probably a little more comedic, and we always try to ground them in reality later on in the episode and make them mean something in the end. Donna fans have been really wanting to learn more about her backstory, and I feel like we learn both why she chose to become a legal secretary and about her family—how she chose security over the risk of becoming an actress. We learn what her middle name is, and we do it in a comedic way. As an aside, one of our writer’s middle name is Roberta, and that’s why we did that—because it made me laugh when we found out her middle was Roberta.
I think it continues the bond of Donna and Louis. In the end, you reveal getting Louis out onstage was for Louis’ own good—she wanted to help him get over his stage fright. We wanted to connect that—that Donna knows Harvey’s been angry at Louis and Louis has felt shunned once he found out about Malone. Louis is feeling put down a lot, so this was also a way to give Louis and Donna some nice moments. As far as this season has gone so far, this feels like a little bit more of a lighter episode than some of the others. We wanted to have a sort of guns-down episode, which is when Harvey and Mike go to their dinner, and in addition to that, we’ve been pretty relentless on this takeover battle, so we wanted to give a little air and have a fun emotional thing—and that also led to inspiration for that last scene with Harvey and Donna. Because we thought, “We’ve done this whole thing, and we haven’t mentioned Harvey and Donna at all,” and you realize that he knows what’s going on with her and he cares about her.
It’s funny to hear you say it’s a lighter episode when Rachel has a health scare and ends up in the hospital. That’s the level of drama you’re working at this season: “Hospital’s a light episode.”
[Laughs] Well, I guess I would say there are a lot of lighter scenes. But I see fan reaction, and I think people say, “There was a lot more victories in the first season and a lot more lighter stuff.” I feel like it’s sort of a natural evolution of the show to tilt it a little bit to the heavy stuff, because sustaining the light stuff over a long period of time—maybe it’s just for me—becomes less interesting. But we still always try to put in light and fun stuff as well.
Like Louis and Harvey’s Karate Kid crane kick scene last episode. Was that all scripted?
The crane kick was scripted, but Harvey was just supposed to push him over with the slightest touch of a finger. But instead, they did the tie stuff and we liked it, so we left it in.
We need to talk about Rachel: So she faints at law school because she’s so overworked. In the hospital, she dreams about Logan asking her to marry him but she says no—because he’ll always be a fraud. Then Logan turns into Mike: Is she thinking that Mike and Logan are both fakers, or that if she can forgive Mike for being a fraud than she can forgive Logan for being an adulterer? How should we read what’s going on in her mind in that moment?
We took a couple of cuts in that scene. The scene had a long ending with Mike saying, “I love you like I loved Jenny and Tess…” and it just ended up being a little bit more confusing. The initial idea was that we’re seeing a flashback to when Logan asked Rachel to marry him. Then we thought, “Let’s not make it a flashback. She’s been sedated, and sometimes when you’re on sleep aid medication you can have some weird dreams.” So in our mind, she had that moment with Logan at the end of [the previous episode], and she’s been trying to avoid him all of [this one]. She’s feeling the stress of working super hard, going to law school, this guy is pursuing her. She is at her wit’s end. I think it’s her subconscious mind’s way of trying to process: Does she have feelings for Logan? Has she always dated people who, in one form or another, were some kind of fraud in her mind?
So that triangle continues on.
It continues on, and the thing that leads into [the next episode] is the fact that, when she gets back into the office and Logan’s sent her flowers, she realizes that he’s not just going to go away. He leaves her a message that they like the Piedmont Avionics idea, right? So in other words, she’s going to be stuck having to work with him more. And he’s going to continue sending her flowers, and he tried to kiss her. She’s got a problem on her hands. So that’s going to lead into episode 6.
Rachel’s taken some heat for having an almost-moment with Logan. I think she’s under a lot of stress, and this thing’s taking a toll on everyone to some degree. I think part of what we wanted to do this episode was to see a little bit of a reconnection between Mike and Harvey, even if it’s just a small interscene of that, and to see that something can happen that can get them to put their guns down and have a talk. Mike does tell Harvey that he understands what Harvey did in going in to Gillis, and Harvey tells Mike he understands what Mike did with Louis. Harvey doesn’t blame Mike for the Louis thing—Harvey blames Louis. Harvey tells him it was harsh, but it was brilliant. He kind of tips his hat to him. So I think it’s an interesting episode for Mike and Harvey. And I’ll say that [next week] is a big episode. If we took a little break in 5—which maybe people will think that we did, and maybe they won’t—6 is a major episode.
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'Suits' creator talks 'Pound of Flesh' (and what's next) | Inside TV | EW.com
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'Suits' creator thinks you're being too hard on Mike
By Mandi Bierly on Jul 16, 2014 at 5:41PM
The battle for Gillis Industries has fans of Suits (Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET on USA) wondering just how low Mike and Harvey will go. To recap: Harvey revealed a portion of Mike’s questionable past to Gillis, and to retaliate, Mike momentarily kept Harvey’s father’s master tapes from him. To throw Harvey’s ally Louis off his game before a court appearance, Mike made Louis believe that his ex, Sheila, had gotten engaged. Letting his emotions distract him cost Louis the respect of his “best friend” Harvey, which made Louis angry enough to gloat when he cut off Mike’s best hope at an investor. Louis’ smack talk inadvertently gave Mike the idea to use one of Harvey’s enemies, Charles Forstman, against him—and Forstman will only give Mike the money he needs if Mike agrees to cut his new boss, Jonathan Sidwell, out of the deal in the end.
Bottom line: Harvey may have kindly warned Mike about getting into bed with Forstman (recurring guest star Eric Roberts), but he had harsher words for Louis, who screwed up yet again.
Creator Aaron Korsh breaks down the drama, which adds more layers in the July 16 episode.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Starting with Mike’s play with the tapes, his moves have been somewhat controversial. How do you see them?
AARON KORSH: It’s interesting to me, because it was supposed to be a reaction to Harvey going so personal: Harvey goes and basically leads [Gillis] to believe that Mike was a drug dealer. So we felt like, certainly, it was a lashing out on Mike’s behalf, but that it was in response to something. And in the end, he does give the tapes back, and Donna is the voice of understanding why Mike did that. It seems like fans are really hard on Mike, and not as hard on Harvey.
With the Sheila thing, the truth of it is that he tells Louis that Sheila was engaged to another guy to throw Louis off in the moment—but in his mind, he knows Louis is going to get back [to the office] and find out that Sheila wasn’t engaged. It’s a momentary thing that isn’t true. So I did not think that people would be as affected by that move as they were. And then when Rachel calls him on it, in Mike’s mind again, if he loses this thing, thousands of people’s lives are going to be affected negatively by it. If he had to put Louis through an hour of false heartbreak, in his mind, it’s not that bad. So I didn’t think this thing was on the same level as Harvey’s dad’s master tapes, because that’s just a punitive thing that wasn’t even used as a move to get ahead.
That’s how we felt about it, but I can see that people are really up in arms about it. And Mike’s traveling down a path—he’s doing things he probably never would have done before. He’s alone. It’s like him against the world. He’s finding out who he is without his anchors of Harvey and Donna.
That last scene between Harvey and Louis in the July 9 episode, when Louis gets teary-eyed saying, “I’m emotional, you’re cold. You’re loved, and I’m hated” gutted fans.
When we were in the rewrite of that scene, we didn’t know 100 percent how Harvey was going to react [to Louis screwing up again]. Harvey yells at Louis a lot—and we were trying to get a different flavor of how he was going to respond. And we had an incident: One of the editors or the assistant editors made the same mistake a few times on what’s called continuity, which gives you the timing of the show on each scene. We have to cut the show down to time, and we spend a lot of time making sure that it’s right. Finally, I was like, “I don’t want to get mad at you guys, but you keep doing the same sh–.” And when we got to the scene with Louis and Harvey, I just remembered that, and I put it in there. We have three editors, and they each have an assistant, and I didn’t know who would be editing each episode—it turns out that it was those guys. I’d forgotten it, and I certainly wasn’t going to mention it to them. The editor said that he and the assistant, when they got the scene in dailies, said, “It’s like Aaron’s talking to us through the TV.” [Laughs]
It was just a funny little thing, but I would say a lot of how I write—and how I want each writer to write—is that things remind me of situations that I’ve been in, and I draw on how I was feeling in those situations to come up with an indication of how the scene should go or should be written. So I put myself in the situation that Harvey was in: I didn’t want to keep being mad, but they kept doing the same sh–. Then we came up with the “emotional” and “cold” stuff—I forget what led to that. I thought their performances in that scene were so good.
I think fan reaction to Mike speaks a lot to Rick Hoffman’s performance as Louis. He’s had such an arc, and you’re really rooting for Louis and Harvey. So watching him make blank copies so he has a place to tear up and hearing Harvey give up on him, it’s rough.
We talk about it a lot as writers: Mike didn’t see all that stuff. We’re wanting him to have seen it, but he didn’t. This is the other thing I will say in Mike’s defense: He comes back to apologize sincerely to Louis, and the only reason he tells Louis about going to Harvey’s enemy is actually to convince Louis that his apology is sincere. He’s not going to tell Harvey [Louis gave him the idea]. He’s trying to say, “Louis, I told you that because I really am sorry about what I did.” And Mike did not overreact when Louis blew things with Gianopoulos: He respected that Louis made a move. So I do feel like Mike has some mitigating factors on his behalf, but it does not seem that most of the fans of the show take that stuff into account or care about that.
I thought about why, and probably the reason why is that you started out hating Louis, and then he’s been redeemed over the years. And you started out thinking that Harvey didn’t care about people, though you’ve kind of peeled that back a bit. I feel like Mike started so innocent. When our characters started innocently and are moving in the opposite direction, it’s harder for people to forgive that.
I remember reading once that if you start out not liking someone but then end up liking them, you actually will like them more than if you’d liked them from the start because you feel bad about misjudging them. Maybe that’s part of why the Louis stuff hits people so hard.
Yeah, that could be it.
You mentioned Mike’s traveling this path. Is it a long road?
You mean the journey into darkness or the takeover battle?
Both, really.
Certainly, the battle is not over yet, and Mike’s exploration of who he is as an investment banker is not over yet. But in the coming weeks, some things are going to change and make him reflect on his behaviors more than he has to date.
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'Suits' creator thinks you're being too hard on Mike | Inside TV | EW.com |
Duve Love Naley DJo Pandie Semma Mccollins Dair 
me too
Or when he was about to go on stage for that play and he was on the phone with his therapist saying sometimes he feels like every Monday Wednesday and Friday for the last 14 years have been a waste. 
So great. 
