I ticked off a long-term goal on my to-do list when I interviewed actor Archie Panjabi. If you don’t recognise her name, you’re sure to know her face – for the last five years she has played the morally flexible investigator Kalinda Sharma in More4’s legal drama The Good Wife, winning an Emmy for her performance. In that time, nobody else on TV has smouldered quite like her, or rocked knee-length boots with such panache. Panjabi fills the four corners of the television like butter does toast – and the result is even more delicious.
Most recently, she’s played pathologist Professor Tanya Reed Smith in The Fall, alongside Gillian Anderson’s DS Stella Gibson (the two recently shared a kiss, much to the excitement of various internet fan communities). But she has an excellent film and television CV – from an adaptation of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth to Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham. What you get with Panjabi is a knowing quality that borders on slyness: she never plays dumb characters, because, you feel, she knows too much. It is an exciting quality for an actor to have – you can never take your eyes off her, which is handy in her industry. Her moves are economical; Wikipedia reports a background in ballet, which makes sense.
Panjabi will soon hang up her sexy boots of justice when she leaves The Good Wife next year. After that, the world is her oyster. She has a development deal with 20th Century Fox, and will star in a drama pilot in the spring. She certainly has the chops, even though she is inexplicably underrated here in Britain. Keep your eyes on her. She’s something special.
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