'Sons of Anarchy': Kurt Sutter really does want Cloris Leachman to guest

Image Credit: Sylvain Gaboury/PR Photos; Ray Mickshaw/FXThose of you who follow Kurt Sutter, creator of FX’s Sons of Anarchy on Twitter, read a recent tweet in which he referred to Cloris Leachman as “a goddess,” said he had to get her on the show, and linked to an article detailing her performance promoting her new Fox series Raising Hope at the TCA press tour. (“I’m so sick of Betty White,” Leachman joked. ”Never liked her.”) We chatted with Sutter shortly after SOA‘s panel yesterday and found out he’s dead serious. Sutter’s wife, Katey Sagal — who stars on the show as Gemma Teller, the badass matriarch of the motorcycle gang — grew up living on the same block as Leachman. “Apparently, Cloris was just as unpredictable back then as she is today,” Sutter told us. We mentioned that we once heard Mark Harmon talk about being former neighbors with Cloris, and he said she would pop up in his kitchen all the time. “It was the same thing. Cloris was always sort of a character…. I love her, and she loves Katey. It’s interesting, Katey and I were having dinner with [FX president] John Landgraf and [actress] Ally Walker a couple months ago, and Cloris was at the restaurant, and it was literally like a 20-minute Cloris show,” Sutter said, with a laugh. “Yeah, it would be fun finding something for her to do on the show. It really would be. I don’t know what that would be — and what her availability is — I’d have to think about it. I think she would be a perfect fit.” (We agree. That face, that volatile energy… It’s too bad Gemma’s mother is no longer with us; Hal Holbrook, who guests in four episodes this season as Gemma’s father, played Leachman’s husband in the 1970 movie The People Next Door.)

Sutter has thought outside the box before: He offered Conan O’Brien a season 3 guest spot when he was going through his Tonight Show woes. “We have an IRA story line that will continue to play out this coming season and I could use a bad-ass O’Brien on my team. Guns, blood, fist fights — you could really work some s— out. Think about it,” Sutter wrote on his blog last January. Did Conan ever bite? “He did a thing before he left about possible job offers that he was getting, and being on my show was one of the things he read on-air, so I thought that was a nice acknowledgment of that,” Sutter told us. “But no,” he added, chuckling again, “he did not volunteer for service on Sons of Anarchy.”

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