Sarah Rafferty and Rick Hoffman Tease Return of Suits, Spilling That Secret

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Louis Litt has a target in his sights - and its name is Mike Ross.

With the final six episodes of Suits Season 3 kicking off this Thursday, all you really need to know as a refresher is that Louis found out that Mike does NOT have a file in the top secret Harvard files.

The new installments pick up on that key point, with Louis hot on the trail of finding out what we all know is true: that Mike did not go to Harvard and has been lying from day one about it.

Others in the know are Harvey, Donna, Rachel and Jessica... which is where things are bound to get sticky and complicated.

So, what will the gang do to keep Mike’s secret a secret? I recently sat down with stars Sarah Rafferty (Donna) and Rick Hoffman (Louis) to talk over where we begin in these episodes, along with their feelings about those fabulous Donna/Louis scenes and what we can expect when we arrive at the season finale.

Let’s go get Litt up, shall we?

The Beauty and the Geek

TV Fanatic: The first big question where Donna is concerned is how will she react to Scottie being so immersed in the office and with Harvey. Will she have a problem with it or be supportive?

Sarah Rafferty: A hundred percent supportive. Donna’s on the ‘Let’s make Harvey successful in every realm of his life,’ so she’s not only interested in his professional life. She wants him to finally have a fulfilling relationship. He’s never won in the relationship department so she’s fully on board and doing everything in her power to help him.

TVF: Very adult of her.

SR: Yes. Well, she herself thinks that she’s not in love with Harvey. That’s what she thinks.

TVF: What is Louis’s piece in all this? He’s got a lot on his plate with the whole Mike situation.

Rick Hoffman: Obviously he’s busy with his little snipper after Mike, but all I can tell you is there is some interesting new stuff for Louis with Scottie and I’ll leave it at that. But there is definitely some interesting lawyering going on between the two of them.

SR: And they are formidable lawyers.

TVF: You guys have fun scenes together as Donna feeds Louis information to send him off on his hunt. Talk about playing in some of those scenes because the show can get really dramatic at times but then something like they put you two together and a lot of times it’s fun. How is that for you guys as actors to play those different sided of each other?

SR: I would hope it’s comedic.

RH: And there’s everyone else’s relationship with each other and with Louis and Donna, yeah, it started off as comedic where she completely always gets the best of him and he’s just like this puppy dog with her.

But then there are these great serious scenes where you could just see that there was a moment heart to heart in last season’s finale…he respects her so it leads to occasional soft, tender moments and then as well as them being completely hilarious with one another and her coming in to try to squeeze him….him coming to squeeze her with tickets. It’s really one of the most fun types of scenes…

SR: …dynamics to play.

RH: He gets to have both. There is going to be something coming up where there are both.  Can’t say what it is but there are unexpected moments between everyone during these six episodes, including Louis and Donna.

SR: Also something I really love about the back six because you touched on it, there is a lot going on for Donna vis-à-vie the trail that Louis is on but also I feel like there’s so much variety in what Rick and I get to play with each other because of how much respect that these two characters have for each other and because they’ve worked together for such a long time and that we get to see their history and we get to see how deep things run between them which is really great.

RH: Even more so it’s accentuated in these next six episodes.

SR: More than ever.

TVF: Anything else with Donna’s love life? I know that was a lot of the first half but anything popping back up?

SR: It doesn’t pop back up. I think she’s obviously incredibly resilient because she’s just back at work and back to tending the home fires at Pearson and Specter and she has a lot of work in these next six in terms of needing to circle the wagons. Aaron [Korsh, Creator] likes to say that she’s the emotional glue that is trying to hold everybody together while they’re under assault and she has varying degrees of success in doing that.

TVF: Anything you haven’t done yet that you would like to do with your characters?

RH: Seriously…don’t make that joke you always made.

SR: What joke did I always make?

RH: I love hearing it because she’s teasing. She goes, ‘We should make out.’

TVF: Hilarious.

RH: But seriously, tell him what you were telling me.

SR: I actually just thought of this, this morning. Look, I will preface this by saying it is such a delight as an actor to just be on the ride and to just know you’re in amazing hands and, honestly, I knew that very early on in season two. I am never going to have to chime in, in any way. They are going to take my character on a ride that will surprise and delight me more than anything that I could personally possibly come up with.

That being said, I was just thinking anecdotally…I was like, ‘Donna would have a really fun time if Louis got the flu and she had to step in, in a case and [she] had to go to court and present something.’ Obviously legally she couldn’t do that but if there was some way that she could have a massive skill set…

RH: To add to what you’re saying I think they are all trying to ultimately sort of implement something different for her because, look, she’s not a lawyer but something that keeps it still believable so I think the writers because they really treat just the characters with so much love that I think they’re constantly trying to work on that kind of stuff as we’d all love to see her in some fish out of water type of situation. So I think with time they’ll come up with it.

TVF: Anything you can tease about the finale? I know it feels like it’s far off away but those six episodes are going to go fast and everybody’s going to want to know.

SR: It’s a rough ride, the back six, because at the end of [episode] fifteen you’re pretty sure you’re going in one direction and then it goes in another direction.

RH: Then it goes in another.

TVF: Love that.

SR: Here’s what I’ll say is that you’re just kind of wrenched around a lot.

RH: It’s a testament to the writers somehow not being redundant and keeping some stuff that you just never would see coming interesting. Really they have this knack to somehow working on two different levels of what this could cause here for this person and…

SR: The second that you think you can predict what’s going to happen, you’re wrong. And that happened to me.

Suits airs Thursdays at 9/8c on USA.

Jim Halterman is the West Coast Editor of TV Fanatic and the owner of JimHalterman.com. Follow him on Twitter.

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