Angels of ER continued...
At lunch, Part Two:
Margulies: I call Sherry "Norma Rae" [after the union organizer played by Sally Field in
the 1979 film]. We’ll be in my trailer, she’ll go off on some injustice. I’m like, "You go, girl!"
Then I’ll walk outside and go, "That’s what I have to do. I have to be like Norma Rae!" and I’ll
go right to the person we were discussing. Only later do I realize that Sherry is just venting to
me. When I tell her I confronted the person, she’s like, "You did what?!"
Stringfield: But if someone ever says to me, "You crossed the line," I’m like "Hey, George owns homes over the line." [They all laugh.] He lives there. If stuff gets really bad, I’ll say, "George, save us" He goes [big, hearty voice], "All right," and he’s got his stethoscope up his nose in two seconds. And I’m like, "Exactly. Life’s good again."
Stringfield heads off to the set, where she cuddles a plastic baby for half an hour. When the scene is ready, the real baby arrives--the niece whom Dr. Susan Lewis is desperate to adopt from her flaky sister, Chloe--and does five or six takes like a pro. But gradually the baby starts to cry. Stringfield, unperturbed, keeps nailing her lines, but the assistant director is glued to his walkie-talkie: "Can we get the replacement twin in here? We’re down to one twin!"
"The hours the writers spent talking about what would happen with Lewis and the baby- we spent more hours than I did selecting a school for my real son," says Carol Flint, another ER writer/co-executive producer. "It was very emotional." (The fate of baby Suzie changed from week to week with the writers’ opinions--but Chloe’s recent reappearance doesn’t bode well for Lewis’ future as a mom.)
"I was thrilled to play the baby stuff because I don’t know how people do it," Stringfield says later, over Diet Cokes (her addiction) on a hotel patio not far from her West Hollywood apartment, all of Beverly Hills at her feet. She looks like a star--funky fitted white shirt, sandals, wisps of hair blowing in the breeze. Her conversation is like a jazz riff, free-form and deliberately wacky. Clooney calls her a real dame, and he’s right--she’s Judy Holliday in a lower register.
"It’s fun to play any situation where you’ve gotta act like you know what you’re doing." Stringfield says. "But mostly I love the details. By the fourth episode I noticed I was the only doctor calling patients by their first name. I went, ‘This is cool, it’s so right on.’"
To prepare for the role, she spent time in an ER with Dr. Lance Gentile, one of the show’s two medical consultants. "After I got over the whole ‘Omigod this is traumatic’ thing, I saw that Lance would help people, but he would also walk away from them rolling his eyes like, ‘Ah, not this again.’ I started to see the real j-o-b in it."
Still, Stringfield says she’s "not the kind of person who walks into a room and goes, ‘OK, put the chairs this way, and we’ll all sit here.’ A doctor does that. I’m like, ‘I’ll sit on the floor.’ Just to get used to barking at people--I would look up at Eriq or Anthony, both over 6 feet, both handsome, and yeah, right, I’m gonna yell at them." She laughs. "It’s not your first instinct. But Lewis is a woman who can look at anyone and go, ‘No, you’re wrong.’ She doesn’t give a s---."
And Lewis isn’t very trusting, she says: "If you betray her, you’re out. I understand that. I have compassion, but I’m a big believer of, if you accidentally punch me in the face, I still have a black eye."
Stringfield, 27, grew up in New Mexico and Texas--"soccer and volleyball and camping with my two younger brothers," she says. "The greatest gift my family has given me, they’re really wise, their philosophy is, ‘Don’t go there.’ Over there, the noise and insanity- don’t go there." (It’s become an ER catch phrase.)
Her dream was to move to New York to act, and it never let her down. On her first trip--with her high school theater coach and seven other students, to audition for drama colleges--the hotel they’d reserved gave away their rooms to celebrities arriving for a celebration at Radio City Music Hall. "Stars are walking in on the red carpet, and we’re sitting on our luggage," Stringfield says, "I go up to the people behind the desk, ‘Let me tell you my situation: I’m 17, I’m auditioning for Julliard tomorrow, and I don’t know where there’s another hotel.’ Eventually this bellboy comes over, he takes us up to the East Wing Suite, it’s like $4,000 a night, three stories. And we stayed there for five days--at our original rate, $180 a night. I love Manhattan like no one knows."
She graduated from SUNY Purchase in Westchester, then landed a spot as bad girl Blake on The Guiding Light. "Reading those scripts, I’d just die laughing, like, ‘No, I do not throw water in her face!’ My friends still call me Miss Blake." A short stint as David Caruso’s ex-wife in the first season of NYPD Blue brought her to L.A., but she, too, commutes to New York (she, too, has an unnamed bicoastal boyfriend).
"Five hours of peace on the flight, and all the Diet Coke I can drink," she sighs, "Noah Wyle said to me, ‘You’re the only person I know who goes to Manhattan to relax.’" On one trip, Stringfield met actor/director Eric Shaeffer (If Lucy Fell). Now she’s starring in his next film, which begins shooting this summer.
She exhales a plume of smoke and stubs out her last cigarette. "I think people are quick to label me a lightweight. They think because I want to have a good time and laugh, that I don’t notice things. After being upset about it, now I’m like, No, that’s a great way to go through life. Maybe I am a dingbat. You can think whatever. Whatever. If you think I’m stupid, you’re most likely not going to burden me with your crap."
At Lunch, Part Three:
Stringfield: We call Julianna "Crash Cart" [They all laugh.]
Margulies:[Smart, hurt voice] I just bump into everything. You know when you see
all of us running with the gurney? I’m the one who gets stuck in the door. But Sherry has this
thing with food.
Stringfield: I knew you were going to say that.
Margulies: Whatever she eats ends up on her somehow. One day the cast and crew were eating
chicken and corn on the cob, and Sherry made this announcement: "I am not eating corn." So we’re
all munching down, and I look up [her voice grows thin in hilarity], and Sherry has corn
all over her hair. [All three shake with laughter.]
Stringfield. George, now, he’ll look at me when I eat and go--[shakes her head sadly
and points to her cheek]. Like it’s not even funny anymore, just pathetic. And Gloria, she’s
so serene. She and I flew to New York for a promotion thing with George and Eriq. Eriq threw an
M&M and hit me in the eye, I’m like "Oww!" Totally spastic. We were playing Scrabble, and
George is seriously competitive, and we’re cursing, and here’s Gloria--[perfectly composed
face]. She’s reading a book.
Margulies: I feel like a truck driver around Gloria. After a day in a trauma, I’ll be
going "F--- this" and "F--- that," and Gloria’s like, "Would you please pass the scalpel?"
Reuben: Wait till next season.
It doesn’t take that long. Back on the set, Reuben--in character as Jeanie Boulet (who, as a
physician’s assistant, can diagnose a patient and prescribe drugs)--stands across a hospital
bed from her ex-lover, Dr. Peter Benton (La Salle). He accuses her of misdiagnosing a now
dangerously ill patient; her eyes flame but she says nothing. Between takes, La Salle makes loud
digs about the scene: "What confrontation? I’m right, she’s wrong." Reuben smiles.
But during the last take, Boulet’s composure cracks. "Kiss my ass, Benton," she says as she leaves. Reuben smiles radiantly at director Felix Alcala--"What do you think? Should we call the writer in and ask him?" The writer/producer, Paul Manning, is already there chuckling. Angry people, that’s what we like," he says.
ER has three basic moods: black (the darkness of the medical traumas, evinced by Hathaway’s inner demons), white (the belief that order will conquer chaos, which is Lewis’ approach.) and a soft gray (compassion, Boulet’s beat). "My thing is to try to show that in the madness of it all," Reuben says, "you can still take time with each patient."
And with each actor. One day Laura Innes, who plays whip-cracking chief resident Kerry Weaver, had a flood of medical jargon to say and couldn’t quite nail it. "I was going, ‘Oh man, I can’t do this,’" Innes says. "Gloria quietly took my hand and said, ‘Yes, you can.’"
The strength of Reuben’s presence (she doesn’t say much, but she can warm you up or cut you down with her deep brown eyes) kept Jeanie on the show after her original function--to humanize Benton--had run its course. "We shot one scene," Reuben says, "where I say to him, ‘Why don’t you look at me when I talk to you?’ He says, ‘I am so over you.’ And right at that moment--I’m sure it showed on my face--I knew Jeanie would be thinking, Why did I f--- you? That’s rare for a woman to play that ."
Reuben, 31, is sitting in a health-food restaurant in Brentwood. She shrugs off her suede jacket, rolls her eyes at the people on cell phones at the next table--"La-la land"--and digs into a pile of blue-corn pancakes.
If Margulies had the most exotic childhood, and Stringfield the most all-American, Reuben’s was probably the toughest. Her father, who died when she was 11, was white; her mother, black--not a common situation in suburban London, Ontario.
"And the six kids, all different shades," she says. "I was called everything from brownie to nigger walking to school. And when I was 12--" she stops, choked up. "I’ll never forget this. I walked past these two boys, and they spat on me." There are tears in Reuben’s eyes, but they don’t fall. "I’ve never told anybody about that. I didn’t tell my mom. Communication, expression of feelings, just wasn’t happening in my family. But I took it in, unfortunately. I took it in like there was something wrong with me."
She shakes her shoulders, stabs a pancake. "It’s funny," she says, "because last fall I was on the cover of the Canadian TV Guide, and I thought, I hope all those people that were s---s to me in school see this. I think that’s been an inner drive I wasn’t completely conscious of. I think I turned to acting because my spirit had to find a way to get some of this out, maybe reach somebody else."
How determined is Reuben? Once, on her way to audition for director John Badham, her car smashed into an old van that suddenly stopped dead in front of her on La Brea Avenue (an insurance scam, she says). The first call she made was not to AAA or a friend but to her manager: " ‘I’ve been in a car accident, call John Badham and tell him I’ll be 10 minutes late.’ My manager’s going, ‘Are you OK?’ I’m like, ‘What? Oh yeah.’" Reuben didn’t get the job--but she’s got one in Badham’s thriller Nick of Time.
"I loved working with Johnny Depp on that film because he is so authentic," she says. "One of the things I find most attractive in a man is a sense of self. Not false bravado, or macho stuff." Does she have a boyfriend now? "Nooo," she laughs. "It’s hard to find that here. I watched Legends of the Fall the other night--whoa. To experience that kind of love from a man, that ‘I would do anything for you’ I’ve felt that way about men, for sure. But I’d love to see what it’s like the other way around."
In the meantime, Reuben keeps craziness at bay by "balancing output with input"--yoga, retreats by the ocean, playing classical piano. Her new Santa Monica mountain home is big enough, she says with glee, for "the real thing"--a Steinway. Classical music is the music from God. Like Beethoven, man, he was just so deep." She laughs. "It’s genius, and part of me thinks that when you play the music, you tap into that. To get a little piece of that, by playing it, is enough."
At Lunch, Part Four:
Stringfield: After a long week, people get scary-funny. Like, last season, I looked
up, and there was Anthony coming at us in a golf cart. It had blood bags hanging off it, crutches
strapped to the sides for doors. And he’s honking the horn, going, "Sherrrry!" We’re all like
[calmly], "He’s lost it."
Margulies: I always say that on my hiatus I want to do a play in a black box with
one person and no props.
"There’s a Beckett play where all you see are the heads of the three characters, each of whom is
in her own garbage can," I offer.
Margulies: [Dreamily] That sounds good.
Stringfield: Your own space. [They laugh.]
Margulies: I just wish we were given more scenes of the women together. Why don’t
the chicks ever go out and have a drink, discuss what’s going on, the way men do?
Stringfield: This is how much we cherish chick trauma: Lydia Woodward actually
wrote a scene for me where Lewis looks around and goes, "All riiight, it’s just us ladies today!"
And Malik, a male nurse, answers, "And me." Lewis says, "Oh right, sorry, Malik." It’s reverse
discrimination!
No offense guys. It’s just a chick thing.
