In his own letter to the court, Macy wrote that his wife’s relationship with her daughters “exploded” when the scandal surfaced in March 2019. He added in that letter that the family had been in therapy since his wife’s arrest, and noted that “every good thing in my life is because of Felicity Huffman”.

Notwithstanding the disruptions of COVID and the Hollywood strikes, Macy has been reasonably busy since the scandal erupted, with roles in the series The Dropout (starring Amanda Seyfried as medical scammer Elizabeth Holmes), his long-running series Shameless, as the voice of a Supreme Court judge in the podcast Supreme: The Battle For Roe, and in the shot-in-Australia comedy Ricky Stanicky from Bobby Farrelly, co-creator of Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary.

In February, he told E! News his wife was “doing great … she’s in London doing a play and I’m going to go see her. It’s been too long.”

Huffman has been quietly raising her head above the parapet too. In June 2023, she was the voice of the wife of Macy’s judge on the Supreme podcast. In November, she gave her first television interview since going to jail, in which she said of the bribe “I know this seems crazy … but it felt like I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do it. So, I did it.”

In February this year, she gave an interview to The Guardian in the UK, in which she took a more contrite line. “I walk into the room with it,” she said of the crime. “I did it. It’s black and white.”

She was speaking as she was about to star on the London stage in Hir, a comedy about a disintegrating family, in which she plays a woman who strikes back against the man who has abused her for years with a radical embrace of queerness.

Huffman was nominated for an Oscar in 2006 for playing a trans woman in Transamerica. It was, she told The Guardian, a role she “wouldn’t do now”.

For a long time, it seemed there weren’t many roles Felicity Hufffman would be allowed to do. A pilot she shot in 2020, Sacramento River Cats Project, never went to air.

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But in March last year, she cropped up in an episode of The Good Doctor as a lawyer.

Now, she’s about to appear as a character described as “a brilliant biological psychiatrist who agrees to help the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit investigate a murderous conspiracy theory”.

Anyone inclined to analyse Huffman’s recent behaviour might conclude she’s finally been let out of Hollywood jail.

Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.