“Smokin'!” “Ballsy!” “Scene stealer!”
That’s how some bloggers describe Kalinda Sharma, the private investigator on CBS’s The Good Wife played by British actress Archana “Archie” Panjabi.
In high heels and hot leather outfits, the five-foot-three Panjabi has leveraged her supporting role into a primetime must-see. As a street-smart sleuth for a prestigious law firm, she’s always one step ahead of opposing counsel.
“How’d you find it?” an antagonist attorney asks in one episode after her legal arguments are thwarted by Kalinda’s intrepid fact-finding.
“Find what?” responds Kalinda, casually inscrutable as usual.
“We want to keep her as a person with all kinds of tricks up her sleeve,” says Panjabi, who hadn’t anticipated what an overnight hit the show and her character would become.
It’s not the first time Panjabi has stood out in a supporting role. She was the journalist colleague of Daniel Pearl in A Mighty Heart and the shopaholic sister in Bend It Like Beckham.
Playing the lead in the film Yasmin, she won the 2005 Shooting Star Award at the Berlin Film Festival.
When offered Kalinda, she felt a bit apprehensive about portraying such a tough, guarded individual.
“I wasn’t sure if she would scare people or intimidate the audience,” says Panjabi, who considers herself more playful than her TV counterpart. “I probably laugh a lot more than she does. I’m probably more mischievous.”
From a young age, Panjabi was fascinated by gestures, voices and expressions. Egged on by her classmates, she says, “I would imitate the teachers before they came into the class. I got the whole class laughing.”
The daughter of Indian immigrants, she was also besotted by Bollywood films. And she loved to sing and dance to American musicals like Grease, memorizing every line of dialogue and perfecting the accents in her bedroom.
While making the pilot for The Good Wife, she was initially told that Kalinda’s American accent was “too strong.” Panjabi took it down a few notches and allowed more of her exotic notes to emerge.
She can’t quite describe the result. But she says, “Once I put on Kalinda’s costume and my hair is up, it just comes on.”•
Originally published in Emmy magazine, issue no. 6, 2010.