How Adam Goldberg Built Immediate Trust With Queen Latifah On The Equalizer - Exclusive
On "The Equalizer" reboot, which airs Sunday nights on CBS, Queen Latifah and Adam Goldberg make a great pair. Heading a team of vigilantes, Latifah plays Robyn McCall, aka the Equalizer — a former CIA operative who uses her wide-ranging skills to help others when they have nowhere else to turn. As master hacker Harry Keshegian, Goldberg serves as her analytical right-hand man. Together, they have a natural rhythm, and Goldberg had nothing but good things to say about Latifah during an exclusive interview with Looper.
"She's a super-duper cool, nice person," Goldberg said. "She's like an institution in a way, but we're all pretty friendly, and it's pretty jocular. Nothing is really ever that serious ... I guess I tend to be the class clown, and she's got a really good sense of humor."
That camaraderie came from the get-go when the two first stepped on the set during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. While it was a daunting and uncertain time in the television industry, the overly cautious atmosphere helped Goldberg and Latifah bond instantly, as revealed during our exclusive interview.
'She's a very conscientious person'
Filming for the first season of "The Equalizer" began in November 2020, several months after the collective world shut down over the spread of COVID-19. With strict health regulations in place, the cast cautiously convened on set every day.
Adam Goldberg was a little timid about the situation at first because he was overly cautious of germs. Any concerns quickly subsided once he met Queen Latifah.
"As it turns out, she's a very conscientious person," Goldberg said. "We all had to trust each other a lot in the beginning, in the pre-vaccine days, and there was a lot of immediate trust because it was clear that we were all very careful and conscientious."
The trust was so instantaneous, in fact, that Goldberg had no qualms about filming a close-contact scene on his very first day on set.
"The first literal breath of somebody else's air, other than my family's, that I inhaled in a close, enclosed space was Queen's," Goldberg said. "My very first day of shooting was in a car with Queen, and I had been draconianly careful, and I was like, 'All right, here goes.' That was the first time I had breathed another person's air, but if you've got to breathe another person's air, it might as well be Queen Latifah's."
"The Equalizer" airs new episodes on Sundays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.