You could call it a Nero Wolfe sort of mystery.
At least 10 of the female characters that the great detective has had to deal with in the first season of the A&E cable network’s hot new sleuth series look suspiciously alike.
And strangely, they’re said to bear a strong resemblance to a number of female characters who will figure largely in “Nero Wolfe’s” second season, which commences Sunday at 7 p.m. with a two-hour special episode titled “Death of a Doxy.”
In fact, the mystery is deepening. Two of the women appearing together in “Doxy” are the spitting image of each other.
But the mystery has been solved — the way Wolfe’s leg man, Archie Goodwin, would have solved it — by making a few calls. In this case, to A&E headquarters here in Gotham.
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It turns out that all those many, diverse characters are actually played by the same woman: multitalented Canadian actress Kari Matchett.
Hutton’s master plan
And the man responsible for this duplicity — or rather, multiplicity — is Archie himself, which is to say, Timothy Hutton, who stars as Goodwin in the series and is the show’s executive producer. He’s the one who keeps asking Matchett and friends to come back.
“This is a highly stylized show,” said Michael Jaffe, Hutton’s fellow producer. “Mr. Stout [author Rex Stout] wrote with a very, very broad brush. We looked for people to play broad characters, and when we found what we wanted, we kept them.”
Though the ever-changing Matchett has become the one most strongly identified as “the Wolfe lady,” the show’s rep company approach to casting has netted some other notable regulars, including sultry Broadway star Francie Swift (Margot Dickey et al.), Debra Monk (Rachel Bruner et al.) and James Tolkan (Percy Ludlow et al.).
George Plimpton often turns up, typecast as snobby rich guys.
Saskatchewan-born Matchett was an unknown actress, based in Toronto (where Wolfe is shot), when a demo videotape was sent to Hutton & Co. by her agent. She was snapped up for her first role in the show a year and a half ago.
“I was usually cast [in Canada] as `the blond woman in her late 20s,'” Matchett said in a recent interview. “People tend not to be able to see beyond who I am when I walk in the audition room. Tim can, I think because he’s an actor. … I read the episode and couldn’t believe how great it was. I did it, and then Tim kept offering me these juicy parts.”
Matchett’s oeuvre includes playing Wolfe’s adopted Yugoslavian fencer daughter, Carla Lochven; the flashy but endearing blond bomblet Julie Jaquette and the patrician rich lady Lily Rowan, both in “Doxy”; Susan McLeod, a “sweet, young farm girl turned New York model”; and Jane Geer, “a sort of Rosalind Russell character who’s going to be the first female vice president of the largest advertising agency in the country.”
“Oddly, just before `Nero Wolfe’ came about, I’d been thinking, `If only I could step back into the time of old movies, if only I could be given the opportunity to do what Katharine Hepburn did or what Rosalind Russell did,'” Matchett said. “Those kinds of characters, that kind of patter, that kind of language, that kind of script. They don’t exist any more. I just wanted to step back in time. And now I have.”
Swift, who has played “the vampy kind of film noir thing,” gets to play at least one troubled but sweet rich lady in riding clothes in the new season.
“I’m not the killer for once,” she said. “Part of the joy of doing the series is that you keep getting to create new roles instead of doing the same old one week after week. I think Tim came up with the [repertoire company] idea. I think it had been hard to find people he liked and wanted to work with, so he started using us.”
Is it hard to keep switching characters?
“It’s not difficult, it’s fun,” Swift said. “There’s a level of comfort and security working with people you have [worked with] before that allows you to take risks and chances, a sense of freedom. Something we don’t have very much of in New York.”
Traveling woman
Swift, who is single and lives in Manhattan, has been traveling back and forth between Toronto and New York, where she’s starring on stage in “The Dazzle.”
Matchett, who is married and living in Toronto, is looking to parlay her American exposure into a shift of residence to Hollywood.
In the works is a movie called “Hypercube,” a sequel to the surprise hit “Cube.” And she has a Canadian movie just out called “Men with Brooms.”
“It’s a comedy about curling,” she said. “I play this horrible woman, a cold, calculating woman married to a curler.”
Sounds like something out of Nero Wolfe.