Lisa Edelstein on why she left ‘House’: “I Want to Have a Little Bit of Fun”

Lisa Edelstein played Dr. Lisa Cuddy on House for seven years, but as she tells TV Guide in a recent interview, it was time to leave her starring role on Fox’s popular medical drama.

“I loved playing Cuddy for all this time, but I definitely wanted to shift out of that, because I’ve been playing this sort of repressed control freak for seven years,” she told the weekly magazine. “I want to have a little bit of fun.”

The 44-year-old actress is likely having plenty of fun with her multi-episode arc on The Good Wife, which she joined after departing House last spring. The CBS legal drama features Edelstein as a pull-no-punches lawyer, a stark contrast to her role as a “repressed” hospital administrator on House.

Edelstein has also appeared on ER, Felicity and The Practice over the course of her 21-year career in Hollywood. However, just because she’s a veteran of the television world doesn’t mean she walked onto the set of The Good Wife unafraid of beginning a new role.  

“When you play the same character for a long time, you have a shorthand. You get onto the set, you put on your outfit and two-thirds of your work is done because you’ve built on that work for so many years,” she said. “When I got this job, I didn’t audition for it, so I didn’t know what they were thinking in their heads, only what we had talked about on the phone. So it was a risky, scary first day for me and I haven’t had that feeling in a long time.”