Katharine McPhee Is Reintroducing Herself

It’s been eight years since the world first met Katharine McPhee on American Idol , and now she’s taking on her first major non-singing television role on CBS’s Scorpion . With the musical drama Smash behind her, she’s more determined than ever to prove herself.

Katharine McPhee plays Paige Dineen alongside Elyes Gabel as Walter O'Brien on CBS's Scorpion.

CBS

Katharine McPhee has a cold.

"I'm a little under the weather, I'm sorry," she confesses after her third or fourth cough one September morning. "My voice is low, like three octaves lower than normal." At the suggestion that she could somehow use her unusually husky tones in her performance, McPhee laughs politely before adding, "I sound like a 50-year-old smoker today."

In truth, that voice would not be out of place in these surroundings: the dingy, dimly lit Hustler Casino in Gardena, California, just west of Compton. But on this day, the Hustler Casino is standing in for a somewhat ritzier Vegas casino for an upcoming episode of CBS's Scorpion involving an excursion to Sin City.

While the usual patrons rarely glance up from the blackjack tables, Scorpion's cast and crew is buzzing back and forth between the filming location and the holding area, where an impressive array of background performers fidget during breaks.

Despite her cold and the rushed schedule, however, McPhee maintains her composure. It helps that Scorpion was something that came about in the eleventh hour.

"It's been crazy," she says, sitting down in a rare break between takes. "It all just happened so quickly. I was going out for pilot season but I wasn't sure if I would actually end up getting something. I was open to it but wanted it to be something different than what I'd done. And this came at the very end, the tail end of pilot season."

McPhee was fresh from NBC's musical drama Smash when she was cast on Scorpion, which blends action and procedural elements with character drama. Prior to that, she was best known as runner-up to Taylor Hicks on Season 5 of American Idol.

While Smash, which had plenty of naysayers throughout its two-season run, may not have convinced all detractors of McPhee's range, Scorpion is already working toward giving her a complex, fully realized character to work with. Playing Paige Dineen, a waitress and single mother who finds herself enmeshed with a team of problem-solving geniuses led by the brilliant but socially awkward Walter O'Brien (Elyes Gabel), presents a unique set of challenges for McPhee.

"Listen, I honestly don't pay a lot of attention to whether or not people are betting on whether I'll work again," she says. "Do I feel more established? No, I feel like I'm always going to be trying. Every scene I do, I'm more relaxed, but I'm always trying to prove myself because those are the standards I set for myself."

With Jadyn Wong in the Vegas-set episode "Shorthanded."

Sonja Flemming / CBS

View Entire List ›