Patrick J. Adams & Sarah Rafferty Talk ‘Suits’ Rewatch Podcast, Guest Stars, Memories & More

Ever since it blew up on Netflix, the Suits-assaince refuses to die down. First, the former USA hit from creator Aaron Korsh found scores of new fans on streaming, then stars Patrick J. Adams, Gabriel Macht, Sarah Rafferty and Gina Torres started to pop up on awards shows and commercials, Stephen Amell booked the L.A.-based spinoff, and now, we have Sidebar: A Suits Rewatch Podcast.

Hosted by Patrick J. Adams, who starred as fake lawyer-turned-felon-turned-real lawyer Mike Ross, and Sarah Rafferty, who was everyone’s favorite executive assistant-turned-COO Donna Paulsen, the SiriusXM podcast just launched today and will find the pair sharing their personal experiences, interviewing fellow cast members, and answering listener questions. And per the Sirius release, it’s not exactly a rewatch…more like a first watch.

“Surprisingly, though they were both series regulars, this will be the first time that Patrick and Sarah are actually watching the series. Listeners can join them on their journey as they react to moments and performances and discuss why “Suits” became a TV phenomenon.”

Having covered the show since Day One, including two TV Guide Magazine cover stories and multiple set visits, it was a blast to reconnect with Patrick and Sarah ahead of the show’s debut to see how much they recalled from the show’s nine-season run from 2011 to 2019. And it turns out, they may need this podcast as much as the fans do!

OK, so obviously we’re all back in our Suits era and it has been insane! So let’s talk about this podcast, because how have you guys never watched the show?!

Patrick J. Adams: [Laughs] I mean, to be fair, we’ve seen episodes of the show. We’ve just never been able to exactly quantify how many. I’ve always said it’s probably, max, watching a full episode is between 15, maybe 20. No more than that. Obviously I directed some episodes, so I had to watch those and I had to watch some episodes in preparation to direct episodes.

And in the first season, I tried to watch every episode. But as the show went on, I began to realize that I’m not great at watching myself, and it was starting to affect my ability to do my job properly. I would come to set and just be filled with all the like, “Oh, I saw that scene and I didn’t look right.” I was getting very in my head about what I was doing in real-time so I just quickly learned that the only move is to just let it go and realize that that’s not my job and I’ll just trust that everybody else is making the show as good as it could possibly be and that I have no control over that. So yeah, I just stopped and then I never went back.

Sarah Rafferty: If I did watch episodes, which I think I did do more at the beginning, I’d go through them very fast on triple speed. [Laughs] But there’s no chance now with the amount of time that’s gone by and with how full life is. I think every parent—and Patrick would agree—the time is not in there anymore. So I’m seeing this with fresh eyes, completely fresh eyes, no memory, no recollection.

Adams: It’s sometimes scary how little we remember. [Laughs]

USA Network

I’m excited to see how you handle Mike’s hair journey, Patrick.

Rafferty: [Laughs] There’ll be a segment only on that!

Adams: I’m at a place where I’ve come to a lot of pride about this and I’ll tell you why. My hair goes in some really weird places, but I am proud of that young actor who was willing to just say in the face of a lot of people telling him he looked stupid that, “No, I am doing this.” I don’t know where I got the courage to do that. But yeah, that was a good example of how I don’t even remember what season it starts to get really weird, but I think it’s 4 or 5. [Laughs] And I think by that point I was just like, “I need to do something different. Something different needs to happen.” And even though a lot of very smart people said, “This is not the thing that you should be doing,” they let me do it and now it lives forever and I have to live in that. So it’s a good lesson. [Laughs]

And Sarah, I am guessing you can do segments on Dona’s fashions, like on Vogue, where they look at their best looks. Because Donna slayed in every episode. Even her casual looks were just bespoke.

Rafferty: [Laughs] Oh, not in the beginning. Go back and start over. We’re right at the beginning, Damian, we’re still just starting this rewatch—or this watch, I guess—and we’re seeing it when the clothes weren’t there for all of us. It was early on and we were changing costume designers for a while. So yeah, it’s been cool to see how it started.

USA Network

So is any of it triggering memories? When you’ve done 134 episodes, is the podcast helping you remember, “Oh, this was the episode where that thing happened off camera” or anything? How do you keep it all straight?

Rafferty: Well, we have a lot of people to consult. We can talk to directors and producers and writers and crew members about that kind of thing. But I do think we can dig back in our phones and see what photos we were taking at that time. There’s also blooper reels and deleted scenes and all this kind of behind-the-scenes footage that we can refer to. There’s the journalists who wrote about it. We can see that there’s a lot of ways to trigger the memories, and they do come back. I mean, the blank spaces are also very interesting and maybe we should dig into, why have I blocked that out? [Laughs]

Adams: But Damian, you bring up a good point, which is for us, going into the episodes, it’s like a real research experiment. We have our friend Kristin Shrader, who worked on Suits and is now our researcher and producer on Sidebar. So when we watch an episode, we have our impression of it, but then we can also pull up the call sheet of that episode. We pull up the timing of it, the exact week we shot it, we can go into our phones and look at the pictures we took that week. Kristin always gives us a ton of the press about that episode. We have such a full-court press of everything about the making of that episode that it just begins to flood us with memories from all sorts of different angles. And it makes for a really interesting experiment in getting to go back and live in that moment. When we were shooting, it was so rushed, you know? When you’re making an episode, everything just feels rushed and you kind of miss it all. And now we get to sit and look at it almost like an anthropological study.

USA Network

Ok, so watching the first season…when you watch that, where were you in life at that point?

Rafferty: Oh my God, oh my God, you bring up such an interesting piece that’s going to be a part of our continued conversation, which is how crazy it is to look back on your younger self. And for me, the journey has been surprisingly a kind of sweet empathy for that girl. When I think about all the plates that I was spinning, especially when we’re looking at scenes where I’m secretly pregnant and maybe some of my friends know, but then there’s a kid at home, there’s the traveling back and forth, there’s the feeling incredibly sick, just interesting things.

And then where that goes is, as we all go through life things, is that we’re confronted with like, “Oh wow, gosh, that girl was juggling a lot of stuff that I’ve since processed.” So there is a depth to this. The first season, I was flying back and forth, I had a 4-year-old, I was really missing her. I had been in a place in my career where I thought maybe it wasn’t going to happen in the way that I had dreamt that it could, so how was I going to adjust that and what were my priorities? And it’s very emotional. I mean, our podcast is not therapy sessions, there’s a lot of fun, but there is a lot of perspective.

USA Network

You both spent so much time on that set in Toronto and with each other, but you also had your lives off-camera. Patrick, you were flying back and forth, as well, right? So Sidebar will be looking at not just the show, but your lives, right?

Adams: Yeah. A big part of why we wanted to do this was that, first, we wanted to watch the show. We want to appreciate the show from a new perspective. We want to see what the fans saw and we want to go back and have that experience. But we also want to talk through what were so many monumental transitions over the years that took place in our lives that, again, we did not have time to fully process or talk through. As few of us have in life, you’re just going through it and you’re dealing with challenges and you’re adapting and shifting as much as possible. This is a really cool opportunity to do that with someone I love very much, who has the unique experience of having been through the same thing but also completely different. Sarah had a completely different experience of shooting Suits for years than I did, and some of it we know about and we have an understanding of.

And then as we watch, we’re discovering, “Oh my God, I didn’t really think about that,” or “I didn’t realize what your experience of shooting the pilot was,” or “How did it feel to move to Toronto for that time?” And again, we’re not trying to do therapy here, but we think it will give people an insight into what’s going on behind the scenes for us as this show progresses, to know what’s informing some of the performances, to get to an episode and go like, “This was hard. I remember this episode now. I was in a terrible mood.” Or “Oh my god, Troian and I were fighting so badly that week and I can see it now.” All that stuff I find fascinating. I’d love to hear that from people who are on shows that I love.

USA Network

OK, you just got to my biggest gripe with rewatch podcasts where the actors seem intent on just trashing their former show. That destroys the fan experience for those of us who loved the show they’re dumping on.

Rafferty: Yeah, no…we’re not interested in that. We’re fans of this show. We’re now fans. [Laughs] It’s hard for us to not watch the next episode sometimes! And we are surprised and delighted by how we’re not there to be intensely critical of ourselves. Because some of our closest friends in the world are doing really cool things on the screen that we didn’t see or that we weren’t a part of, so we’re just like, “Oh my gosh!” We just had a conversation with Gina… Wait, are we allowed to talk about that? Am I allowed to say that we had a conversation?

It’s in your trailer.

Adams: [Laughs]  Yeah, it’s in our trailer.

Rafferty: Ok, phew! So we had a conversation with Gina Torres and it was so great. In the second season, I had my newborn and so I was bringing the 4-year-old to Toronto to go to school and Gina helped get her into a school and this and that. But then I was like, “Have I ever told Patrick about this?” You know, like this was this other thing that was going on at the same time that we were shooting. And I mean, we’re definitely not there to spoil or criticize or any of that.

Adams: Or air old grievances, because you do any job for long enough, there’s definitely things that you wish had gone differently or decisions you didn’t agree with. And maybe those will come up, but they come up in a way that’s like funny and “Oh, that’s where I was at at that time.” It’s far less “I want to establish my opinion and say that I was right about it or air a grievance about anything.” That was really a North Star for us when we started this, that we don’t want to ruin that experience for fans. And we also aren’t interested in delving into all of our old grievances or things that maybe we didn’t agree with because that’s not fun for us. That’s not valuable.

USA Network

Speaking of guests, you have a massive nine seasons and ensemble to pull in. Obviously, you have Gina and showrunner Aaron Korsh, but then there’s Amanda Schull, Dulé Hill , and Gabriel, of course. Rick Hoffman. And if you ever need a guest who observed you all at work… [Laughs]

Adams: Oh, you are coming on, Damian, you were such a champion of the show. Come on, you’ll come on.

There’s so many stories journalists who covered the show could tell. Especially just about the soundstages…how you could walk in from extras costuming in the hallway into the set, which led through the file room. And as soon as you say “the file room,” everyone knows what you’re talking about! Or how one section was just a wall of fake legal books. And didn’t you used to skateboard from stage to stage, right?

Adams: Yeah, we used to skateboard until we were told we weren’t allowed. Someone broke an ankle, not one of the actors, but someone in the crew, I think, broke their ankle and we weren’t allowed to skateboard anymore.

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Adams: Can I ask you a question, Damian? You were saying you’ve listened to these other rewatch podcasts….do you have advice for us? Is there anything that you want from us? Is there any way that you would steer us?

Ok, if you have ever listened to How Did This Get Made, it’s hilarious because, like you both, the hosts watch a movie cold and then discuss what went into the development of whatever they watched. And on The Happy Endings Podcast, they are bringing in say, a writer from the show or one of the guest stars, one of the producers, maybe someone below the line. And instead of talking about a specific episode, they talk about maybe that season or their arc on the show. And it’s always so interesting to hear what you were talking about, what their experience was. What it was like for them to come onto the show and how did they fit in? How did they find their way? Who made them feel comfortable? Who was their entry point? How was it saying goodbye to those people when they left? It’s like when the British Invasion season ended…where’d they go?

Adams: Yeah, totally. Totally. So you really love those guests, too. That’s so important to the process. As much as it’s us reflecting on our experience, making sure that you get a lot of voices that come in, too.

I mean, just look at all the love interests that came and went. So much of the fandom would lovingly fight over who was right for Donna. Some people still really loved Thomas, other people wanted Harvey immediately.

Rafferty: Sasha Roiz was so good.

Adams: This is a perfect example. I don’t know who we’re talking about, but now I’m excited. Now I get to meet Sasha. I forget. I don’t know what we’re talking about. [Laughs]

And there’s an opportunity here, too. Bonnie Zane’s going to be a really interesting guest. She was our casting director, so even just starting with, “Why are you a casting director? Can you explain what it is, what your job is?” And there’s so many different people involved that you’re like, wait, how do you pick the music? How much does it cost?

Right! If you can get those people on, fans will want to know “How did they get a Cold War Kids song?” and all of that stuff.

Adams: Technology is really our friend because we’ve already had the opportunity so many times to be like, “Hey so-and-so, can you just send me a voice memo about this exact tiny little detail thing?” And they do. It makes it so easy. Or people being able to Zoom in. It’s so great.

USA Network

Since you’ve talked with Aaron, was he able to share with you anything about the spinoff?

Adams: He told us a little bit about it, just that it was such a positive experience to shoot. And we definitely want to include them. It’s fun that show’s coming out because we can really also champion that and have those people on. Maybe do episodes where we talk about whatever that show is. I mean, all of that’s still in process, but the fact that Suits lives on, that there’s a new family, that there’s new people and that show’s going to be coming out and we can support that is exciting to us.

And Aaron, as a resource for our show, is going to be immense. He’s so supportive of what we’re doing, which is really nice. Some showrunners might not want someone going and poking around under the hood, but he’s all on board. In fact, he’s excited. He knows we didn’t watch the show and it’s always driven him crazy. [Laughs]

Rafferty: He was always so sweet about that because he didn’t really understand why we weren’t watching it. I mean, from our perspective, he respected it, but now he has this sweetness around, like, “I hope you can see it with these eyes, these loving eyes.” It’s really sweet.

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