Law & Order Season 25 is continuing in the fall 2025 TV schedule in the wake of losing a series regular. The next new episode will deliver a Scandal reunion for Tony Goldwyn, who shared why he still feels like “the new kid” on Law & Order despite being in his third season as DA Nick Baxter. Joshua Malina is on board as guest star, and the two former co-stars sharing the screen again reminded me of what Goldwyn said about celebrity guest stars… and why they probably shouldn’t want to play corpses, which comes up surprisingly often.
Now, that’s definitely not to say that Joshua Malina’s character is going to be a corpse by the end of his episode of Law & Order, which airs on October 23 and streams next day with a Peacock subscription. In fact, with the promo leaving him out, I didn’t even know about the Scandal reunion until Malina and Goldwyn filmed a fun video together that leaned into their Scandal days as well as touched on one of the West Wing alum’s most famous lines from that show. Take a look:
If you’re not familiar with The West Wing, Scandal, or even Law & Order front to back, then there are multiple layers to the joke: 1) Tony Goldwyn played the President of the United States on Scandal, 2) Joshua Malina played a character who stumbled through meeting POTUS on The West Wing, and 3) Malina’s Scandal character was an attorney while Goldwyn’s Law & Order character is an attorney.
Joshua Malina is definitely one of the more recognizable guest stars of recent seasons, and that was enough to remind me of when I spoke with Tony Goldwyn and Hugh Dancy about Law & Order Season 25. Law & Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay had once shared that “all they famous people” want to “be a dead body” on her show, and that’s apparently true for the original series as well.
Dancy confirmed that celebrities “more often than not” want to play a corpse, and Goldwyn explained:
Can I just tell people? Being a corpse is not fun. You have to sit there and not move for hours. Now all of the sudden you’re lying there in the cold winter.
Unfortunately for any actors whose characters aren’t long for the world on Law & Order, the murders of the week rarely happen in nice, warm, cushy locations that would be comfortable for playing dead for hours on end. Hugh Dancy agreed with Tony Goldwyn, joking that victims should have “the good sense to be killed in the summer.”
Goldwyn went on to share that he doesn’t always know ahead of time when a notable name is going to guest star on the show, but he’s also heard from an EGOT-winner that she’d love to appear. He told me:
I always check our call sheets, which for people that don’t know, that’s the daily work schedule, and you see the names on the call sheet. And often it’s like an old friend or an actor I’ve admired for years. Jennifer Hudson actually told me she’s dying to be on law and order, so I spoke to [showrunner] Rick Eid about that.
While Goldwyn may not always know the full cast list of an episode before getting the call sheet, I’d be very surprised if he didn’t know that he’d be working with Joshua Malina again after they shared the screen on Scandal for seven seasons. On the subject of the serialized Scandal vs. the procedural Law & Order, Goldwyn shared:
There’s more of that that people can look forward to, whether it’s family members of ours getting ingrained in the story, or outside relationships we have that muddy up the work environment, or as we said, our personal [lives] and the tensions between us as people.
Tune in to NBC on Thursday, October 23 at 8 p.m. ET for the episode of Law & Order that features Joshua Malina, ahead of Law & Order: SVU at 9 p.m. ET with a guest star who was already a huge fan of the show. You can also stream the episodes starting on Fridays on Peacock.