Margo Martindale had a very short performance on this season’s penultimate episode of “The Americans,” but it was enough for her to win her second Emmy Award on Saturday night. She was way behind in our poll of experts, editors, and users, seemingly quite surprised at her own victory while accepting the award on stage.
Martindale’s first Emmy win was for her villainous role on “Justified” in 2011. Since then she has received three straight nominations for playing KGB handler Claudia on the FX drama series.
Related: Complete list of 2015 Creative Arts Emmy winners
According to exclusive Gold Derby odds, she was supposedly far behind in fifth place with 33/1 odds. Cicely Tyson (“How to Get Away with Murder“) was the frontrunner with 1/4 odds. Six-time champ Allison Janney (“Masters of Sex), who won this category last year for the same role, was in second place with 9/1 odds. First-time nominee Rachel Brosnahan (“House of Cards“) was in third at 25/1, followed by Diana Rigg (“Game of Thrones“) at 50/1. In last place was Khandi Alexander (“Scandal“).
In her submitted episode “I Am Abassin Zadran,” Gabriel (Frank Langella), the current handler for KGB spies Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell), meets with Claudia to reassure him about a course of action. Gabriel is having second thoughts about recruiting Philip and Elizabeth’s teenage daughter, but Claudia encourages him to proceed. She describes the fallout in Russia after a similar plan failed catastrophically with another family of spies, but she insists that their superiors have faith in Gabriel to succeed where others failed.
Related: Watch our Emmy webchats with many of this year’s nominees
Which show will win as Best Drama Series next week?. Make your own Emmys picks now to the right or at the bottom of this post, and you could win one of our three prizes ($500, $300 and $200 Amazon gift certificates) as well as a place of honor on our leaderboard and a starring role in next year’s Top 24 Users (the two dozen folks who do the best predicting this year’s Emmys line-up).
Last year, our Experts had an accuracy rate of 58.62% when it came to predicting the Emmy winners. That score tied them with both Gold Derby’s Editors and the Top 24 Users (those two dozen folks who did the best at predicting last year’s Emmys). Our Users scored 51.72% (Click on any of these groups to see what they got right and wrong last year.)
Which group will be victorious this year? Meet the guy who won our contest to predict the Emmys last year — and learn how he did it and how you can be our next Gold Derby superstar.
As some of our Users turn out to be our smartest prognosticators, it’s important that you give us your predictions. Your picks influence our Users racetrack odds, which also factor into our official combined odds.
Photo: Margo Martindale in “The Americans.” Credit: FX
