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 in a recent interview, it was time to leave her starring role on Fox’s popular medical drama.

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.”

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