WHITE COLLAR: Tiffani Thiessen Talks Her Role and Teases What’s Next

In the charming, lighthearted police procedural White Collar, Tiffani Thiessen portrays Elizabeth Burke, the devoted and helpful wife of FBI Agent Peter Burke. In a recent conference call with NiceGirlsTV, Tiffani shared her insights on her role and the show.

Right away, Tiffani admitted that she loves the role of Elizabeth simply because it is the most like who she is in her personal life. In fact, she laughingly added, “I aspire to be Elizabeth Burke every day! I love that she’s a career-driven woman. I love that she puts her relationship and her marriage first. I love the relationship she does have with her husband where there’s a lot of love between the two of them and a lot of trust — there’s also a great friendship between the two of them.”

While enjoying how closely Elizabeth mirrors herself, Tiffani also candidly shared that the role has created challenges too in that, “the hardest thing is the juggling aspect of my personal life, now having a baby and going to work.” But despite that one small wrinkle of finding ways to balance her personal life against her professional life, Tiffani is pleased with the opportunity to work on White Collar, saying, “Everything else is quite nice and fun, I feel very blessed to have the cast and the crew that I do.”

Talking a bit about her on-screen husband Peter Burke, played by Tim Dekay, Tiffani happily shared, “Tim is such an amazing man! I fell in love with him the first moment I met him. I was always such a big fan of his work. I’ve watched a lot of his shows in the past — and when we had our first chemistry read — we hit it off right away. Funny enough, it’s like he and my real husband have a lot of the same qualities so it kind of just fits and it really took off from day-one.”

In addition, while working to flesh-out her character, Tiffani explained that because of the great relationship with the writers, producers and creators of the show, there is an open-door policy and they welcome any suggestions she has about who Elizabeth is and what she does. One great example was how it was Tiffani’s idea that Elizabeth be an event planner, which creator Jeff Eastin loved and he had it written into the show.

Tiffani also mentioned that one of the biggest draws to her character was Elizabeth’s strength. She elaborated, “It was definitely written that way and that was one of the reasons I loved the character so much. I’ve said this so much but you don’t see a lot of strong women who have strong marriages on TV, you don’t see that very often. That was one thing I really enjoyed reading the script and really falling in love with Elizabeth in that sense. Absolutely, it was written that way for sure, but every actor puts their own two cents into a role to make it their own.”

Then sharing a bit about the recent episode “Burke’s Seven,” in which Elizabeth saved the day by intervening with a persistent phone caller, Tiffani laughingly shared, “It was really fun and you actually get to see even more of that towards the end of this season.” She also noted, “I always love to get in the mix with the guys. [It is so] much fun to get to work with Tim and on the business side of things — and Matt [Bomer] is adorable.” As for the infamous Willie Garson, Tiffani revealed, “I actually started doing more and more things with Willie which has been quite fun — it’s a rarity that we have such great chemistry.”

In addition to the fun Tiffani is having playing Elizabeth and working with Tim, she loves the budding friendship between Elizabeth and Neal. In fact, she gushed, “Who doesn’t want to stand next to Matt and work with him?!” She also teased that towards the end of this season there is an episode where Elizabeth and Neal spend almost the entire episode together – though she would not explain why they were together for such a long period of time.

With that teasing tidbit to tantalize fans, Tiffani recommends that fans tune in and find out what happens next in an all new White Collar episode on Tuesday, February 8th at 9/8c on USA Network.