‘Matlock’: Jason Ritter Explains That Major Matty Plot Twist & What’s Next

[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Matlock Season 2 Episode 9, “Collateral.”]

Jason Ritter‘s Julian was delivered a life-changing shock at the end of the Matlock Season 2 midseason premiere. The episode, which aired on Thursday, February 26, on CBS, ended with Matty (Kathy Bates) confronting Julian about the Wellbrexa case. Here, Ritter breaks down the episode’s ending and teases what’s to come.

The last time we saw Julian, he was spying on Matty and Olympia (Skye P. Marshall), his ex-wife, and learned a bit of their scheme around the Wellbrexa document. He spent the entire midseason premiere in conflict with Olympia after revealing what he knew, and she came clean with some true information while still keeping some of Matty’s secrets.

Olympia was explicit that she wanted Julian’s father, Senior (Beau Bridges), to take the legal fall for burying the Wellbrexa study, since he ordered Julian to do it in the first place, and Olympia is sympathetic to her ex-husband’s struggles with his father’s approval. She provided collateral to make Julian trust her, and it worked a bit, but eventually, more information had to come out.

The episode ended with Julian at the Kingston house and Matty revealing her true identity. She showed him her and Edwin’s (Sam Anderson) investigation board that had Julian smack dab in the center of it. Matty gave Julian a powerful look when revealing the truth about herself and why she’s at Jacobson Moore, and Julian looked back at her, terrified.

Complicating matters even more is Senior, who has awoken from his coma after his stroke and is treating Julian much more lovingly after his brush with death. Julian’s senior position at the firm was reinstated, and after Sarah (Leah Lewis) apologized to him about spying on him for Senior, Julian gave her a spot on his team. He believes in “second chances,” he said. It only feels like a matter of time before Sarah catches wind about Wellbrexa.

Dive into the episode with Ritter below.

Julian gets a big shock with Matty’s reveal at the end of the episode. Did he see this coming at all?

Jason Ritter: No. He knows that something’s been going on with the Wellbrexa file, and this has come to light for some reason, but I don’t think he knew how deep this went. And when you see all of the evidence that he’s thought has been hidden and these details, like the fire alarm, you see that this has been a meticulously researched case that they’ve been building against him. I mean, it’s never good if you see one of those conspiracy boards and all of the red yarn is pointing to your picture. Initially, with the Wellbrexa study, Olympia knowing about it, he felt maybe there’s some kind of way out. He’s realizing how deep in it he is at this moment.

How does Julian feel about Olympia in this moment?

I don’t think he trusts either of them in that moment. They’ve clearly been lying. He doesn’t know that Olympia was read into this at a certain point by Matty or that she figured it out. For all he knows, Olympia has been doing this research the entire time she’s been working at Jacobson Moore or our whole marriage. At the beginning, he is a cornered animal. Earlier in this episode, he visited Matty Matlock at her apartment. He thinks this is her life. This is where she lives. And all of a sudden, the level of betrayal is just mind-boggling. He realizes exactly how much he underestimated Matty Matlock at his own peril.

Michael Yarish / CBS

Well, he didn’t know he needed to overestimate her.

Exactly. And the fact that Olympia has been working with her, he just doesn’t know who to trust. I don’t think Julian has been on the receiving end of broken trust many times in his life. He’s broken some people’s trust. This is the first time someone has really pulled the wool over his eyes for an extended period of time.

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I imagine that Olympia might explain to Julian when she found out about Matty in future episodes, but could he even trust that?

Well, that’s the thing. His lawyer side is going to come out and basically say, “You’re an unreliable witness. I’m going to need some proof that you are now telling the truth.” That’s the problem. If someone has been lying and lying and lying and lying and they go, “OK, but now I’m telling the truth,” how can you trust them at that point? It’s going to be a challenge to get Julian to trust them and not try to run, kicking and screaming, away from his consequences.

It’s kind of like Olympia has become Julian’s Matty.

Exactly.

Now they have to ask, “Can we trust each other? Should we even try to trust each other?” They clearly have more reason to because of their shared history.

Yes, and one of the things that Julian can hold on to is that they both love their kids so much, and maybe, despite what Olympia might think of Julian as a husband or a man, his role as a father to their children is an important one. Maybe he can hold onto that.

Tell me what it was like to film that scene with Kathy Bates and have her look at you like that.

She has this power to her that she can just lean into. She could be so sweet and funny, and then in some of these moments, I felt frozen. It was also amazing because I’ve watched the show, I recognize the board and the set and things like that, but I have never been over there [in the Kingston home set]. It’s in another lot. And so I was in a completely alien environment to me, and trying to wrap my mind around what it would be like to have someone say, “You’ve known me for this extended period of time, and you’ve always thought I was this other person, but it’s not my voice. That’s not my life. That’s not my name. I’ve just been out to get you.” Pretty confronting.

Michael Yarish / CBS

Give a sense of what Matty’s accountability for Julian looks like in the upcoming episodes.

From the first episode, [Matty’s] whole thing has been accountability and putting whoever did this behind bars. We’ve gotten into some gray areas where Julian definitely has some things to atone for, but it wasn’t his idea. There’s a bigger fish who should be [held] even more accountable. And so her anger and her pain about her daughter certainly make it hard for them to be comfortable together in the same room. This whole time, especially from the moment that she knew that [Julian] was the one that hid the document, she has had to be smiling at Julian at work and being just old, sweet, old Matty Matlock. Now the mask is off, and she knows that I know what I’ve done, and she wants to make sure that I know the depth of my actions.

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She can see that Julian has minimized the ripple effect of this one action. He said, “Oh, I took these papers out of this file, so that’s all I did.” That’s not a satisfying answer for Matty. She wants him to really understand the pain that he’s caused. Even if it’s not like, “OK, you may not be able to wrap your mind around 10,000 individual lives, but here’s this one. That’s her face, that’s my daughter, that’s who I love. This is her son.” And then maybe she can get ’em to times that by 10,000 grieving families in communities. But to even acknowledge the one is intense.

They become a representative for the whole thing.

Yes, it makes it real in some way. It’s not just a number on a page.

Now that this truth is out in the open between them, does it make anything easier between this trio? You can move with more clarity with that, at least.

You can definitely move with more clarity. The question is:”In a trio in which there have been manipulation and lies, are we all putting down our swords? Are we coming together? Are we betraying each other? Are you going to lie to me anymore? Or are we really aligned in a goal of trying to figure out what to do about this study, and if we can get Senior to take accountability, which is also complicated by the fact that now he’s ailing?”

It’s harder for Julian to imagine putting him in prison now. A lot of the old feelings of wanting approval start coming back up, even though Julian had been done with that by the end of the first season. All of a sudden, it’s like, “Actually, maybe I do need my father’s approval. If I only have however many days, months, weeks left, maybe I can get the thing I’ve wanted since I was a child.” Those impulses and those instincts can be more powerful than you think and override logic. There are so many different elements coming into this second half of the season. I’m really excited for people to watch it.

A two-part question. Now that Sarah is on Julian’s team, what are the odds that she might find out about Wellbrexa? And the Wellbrexa storyline will end this season. Will the end of that storyline give Julian and Olympia some kind of resolution? Not necessarily getting back together, but just them being good together?

We know that Sarah is brilliant and an incredible researcher, and would definitely be an asset in figuring this all out. But at the same time, every new person you open up to is another potential liability. And so it’s fun to watch how Sarah bounces back and forth in this season. Olympia feels very betrayed by Sarah, where we’ve left off, even more so than Julian, I think, because Julian understands her on a certain level and understands how his dad can be a hard guy to say no to. So, it’s been really fun. It’s also just been fun to have a bunch of stuff with Leah. I didn’t get to work with her very much in the first season, so it’s been really nice.

Matlock, Thursdays, 9/8c, CBS