An unusual summer job prepared Margo Martindale to play a maple syrup smuggler

When Margo Martindale was in high school, she decided to take an unlikely summer job for a teenager. 

"I worked in an insane asylum for criminally insane men when I was 16 and 17, teaching drama," she tells Q's Tom Power. 

Martindale only knew about drama from playing the lead role in her high school production of Bye Bye Birdie. But her experience directing the men allowed her to better understand the complex characters she'd played in her future as an Emmy-winning character actor. 

Martindale helped the men put on a version of Eugene O'Neill's one-act play In the Zone, which is about a murder on a submarine. Many of the men came to the asylum after convictions of murder and sexual assault, so they could relate to the play's themes.

"They were real good," she says. "They all really wanted to act."

Martindale returned the next summer to the asylum because she had a "fabulous" time. But she also learned an important lesson from the men. "It really opened my mind … to see that they're just one step different from me." 

Whether she's playing the role of a crime family matriarch in Justified or a KGB agent in The Americans, Martindale says she thought back to the men she met in the asylum, as well as the people in line with her when she'd get her unemployment cheques cashed. 

"[I'd] think: this makes us all the same," she says. "We're all in this place to get some cash because we all need it. And there was not one person who was different from me. I like thinking that way."

Martindale used this empathy in her newest role in The Sticky. She plays the starring role of Ruth Landry, a rural Quebec maple syrup farmer who pulls an $18 million maple syrup heist in Montreal. Landry's husband is ill and she's broke, so she pulls the heist to save him and her livelihood. 

"All the parts that I have played, they've all been good people who needed something desperately," she says. "I like flawed people."

Martindale's slow build to success helps her with this perspective. She worked in theatre long before she came to TV and film acting in her 50s.

She often speaks with her other later-in-life-success friend, the actor June Squibb. The two lived next door to each other for 30 years. Even after moving away from each other, they're still close. Martindale just celebrated Squibb's 95th birthday. 

"She's remarkable," she says. 

It wasn't until Martindale was 60 that she won her first Emmy for her role of Mags Bennett, the crime family matriarch in Justified. 

"When people get awards right out of the box … I think that it takes away the climb, it takes away the yearning part," she says. "I wasn't acting for winning prizes. I was acting because I love it."

The full interview with Margo Martindale is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Margo Martindale produced by Catherine Stockhausen.