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. 

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.