Actor Dallas Roberts has been cast to
play a gay role in the upcoming season of CBS' The Good Wife,
Entertainment Weekly reported.
The 40-year-old Roberts will play the
role of Alicia Florrick's (played by Julianna Margulies)
never-before-seen gay brother, Owen, a University of Oregon
mathematics teacher.
Owen blows through Chicago as a
visiting professor.
The Good Wife Executive Producer
Robert King said the show wasn't going to make a fuss about the
character's sexual orientation: “We just thought [it would be
interesting] if it didn't matter.”
King went on to say that the additional
character would allow producers to “access more of Alicia's back
story.”
CBS Entertainment President Nina
Tassler first mentioned the addition of a gay character to the show
last week during a Television Critics Association panel in Beverly
Hills.
Tassler said she was “disappointed”
in the network's track record of representing the LGBT community and
promised to do better.
Roberts played gay opposite Colin
Farrell in A Home at the End of the World. He also played the
recurring role of Kit's lover Angus Partridge on Showtime's lesbian
drama The L Word.
The legal drama returns to CBS for its
second season this fall.