For fans of USA’s Suits, it’s been nearly five months since Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) was arrested for fraud. But when the show returns Jan. 27, Season 5 picks right back up with Mike being booked and questioned — and Harvey (Gabriel Macht) and Jessica (Gina Torres) debating the best way to defend someone they know is guilty.

In the exclusive clip above, we meet the prosecutor, AUSA Anita Gibbs (Leslie Hope), who needs to emerge as Pearson Specter Litt’s most formidable foe yet. For Suits creator Aaron Korsh, it all came down to casting. He was only mildly familiar with Hope’s work (which includes NCIS, Tyrant, The Strain, and Revolution) when he saw her reel. “It’s not that she doesn’t have vulnerability, but at her core, she just seemed incredibly strong, and I wanted strength,” he says. “You can write whatever character you want. If they don’t stack up to Harvey and Mike and everybody else, they’re not going to feel formidable.”

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As for Gibbs’s exact motivation, we’ll have to keep watching. “I think we reveal a little bit more of what’s at her core and why this is so important to her a little bit later,” Korsh says. “She is not inherently by the book and all about the law, nor is she corrupt in an out-for-herself sort of way. She will do s–t that’s sort of on the edge of okay. She’s not unlike Harvey. What she does not do is do anything that’s flat-out illegal. She kind of works in the gray. She’s got her own moral code. She’s not to be trifled with.”

The final six episodes of Season 5 revolve around whether Mike and Harvey will have to pay the piper for the decision they made in the pilot (when Harvey hired Mike to be his associate despite the fact that Mike had neither graduated from law school nor passed the bar). “I would say they are going to have to pay the piper, the question is how much?” Korsh says, adding that the same can be said of the other main characters who know Mike’s truth (Sarah Rafferty’s Donna, Torres’s Jessica, Meghan Markle’s Rachel, and Rick Hoffman’s Louis).



What makes Gibbs so dangerous? “Prosecutors go after weak spots. We’ve seen it a thousand times. It’s what they do on TV, and it’s what they do in real life: They find someone that you care about, and they find a legal or semi-legal weak spot to press on, and they press on it to get you to do things you don’t want to do. That’s what is going to happen in these back six,” Korsh says. “Basically, prosecutors try to get people to turn up. They don’t want the dealer, they want the supplier and everything that comes with that.”

The squeeze should make for an intense ride. “You can’t escape it. Even if we do a story that isn’t about it, it’s going to be affected by it,” Korsh says. “In the past, we’ve done very funny stories combined with dramatic ones. It’s just different now because Mike’s future is at stake, as is everyone else’s. We have some small lighter moments, but I don’t think we have a lot of laughs in the back six. The characters are just not in that frame of mind.”

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