It’s mother versus mother and friend versus friend as THE HAVES AND THE HAVES NOTS returns tonight at 9 p.m., and Renee Lawless warns that her alter ego, rich bitch Katheryn Cryer is in full-blown take-no-prisoners mode!
As the second half of Season 2 kicks off, Wyatt has been arrested, and Lawless says Katheryn is “all about getting her son out of jail!” Unfortunately, that could mean that battle lines will be drawn between Katheryn and her maid/gal pal, Hanna, whose own son is still fighting for his life!
Worse still for Katheryn, it looks as if the only way she can help her son is by basically giving control of the situation over to her scoundrel of a husband, Jim! “She paid to put him through law school, so now she has to let him handle it,” explains Lawless. “She’s relinquished power to him, and she has to let it play out. It infuriates her to have to do this, but it’s the only way!”
Although Lawless immediately connected with the character upon first reading the script (“My first reaction was, ‘I am, in many ways, this woman!’”), there are many ways in which they are different. “For one thing,” she laughs, “I don’t have a gajillion dollars in the bank! At least not yet!”
There’s also how they would handle the situation being dealt with by scandal-prone Cryer clan. “Renee would say, ‘I will walk you to the police station, and I will support you and love you through this, but you need to own up to what you have done,’” says Lawless. “But Katherine doesn’t have the same moral compass that I do.”
Not that she’s judging her alter ego. “We don’t know what we would do in these situations,” she concludes. “We like to think we do, but until it happens, we can’t really know!” 
Richard M. Simms watches way too much television and, as executive editor of Soaps In Depth, actually gets paid to do so. You can chat with him on Twitter @dispatchesFTC.