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I’ve never really cared about Julianna Margulies one way or the other. I’ve always thought she was very pretty, but I never watched ER, so I don’t really have the girl-love for her that so many women have. But I’m starting to feel the love after reading her interview in W Mag’s May issue. She’s the cover girl – and what a weird cover it is. She’s so pretty, why do this to her? Why the too-red lips and the big hair? Why can’t fashion magazines aim for elegant? Anyway, Julianna won me over by talking about how much she loves to work in television, acknowledging that she’s “not above auditioning,” and that even though she’s very happy being a mom to her 2-year-old son, she admits, “I was never much of a kid person. I mean, I thought they were cute to look at, but I didn’t want them in my house.” That’s me too. The full W Magazine piece is here, and here are some of the highlights:
On keeping up with a busy schedule: “I’m tired. I drink too much coffee. I’ve learned what a red eye is: a cup of coffee with a shot of espresso in it. Then the other day I was complaining about how I needed to wake up, and someone said, ‘Do you know what a black eye is?’” Margulies giggles conspiratorially, as if she’s talking about an illicit substance. “Two shots of espresso in a cup of coffee. I thought, I don’t want to cross that threshold just yet.”
On aging: Comfortingly, though, when Margulies emotes, fine lines befitting her 43 years do appear around her eyes and across her forehead, extinguishing the suspicion that she must rely heavily on needles to look so good on high-definition television. “I think the whole under-eye-bag thing is hereditary, and I just got lucky,” she says. Goodness knows it’s not the result of pampering: “Someone recently asked me the last time I had a facial. What am I going to say to my child? ‘I know you don’t see me all week long, so Mommy’s going to go get a facial on Saturday?’”
She looks good because she loves her life: “I know this is going to sound corny, but I love my life,” she says. “I love my baby, so I love getting to wake up with him. And I have the most amazing job, with writing that any actor would love and costars who I can’t wait to see on Monday mornings. And I love coming home to my husband. If I had a job I hated or a husband who I was always fighting with, then I would look tired.”
On not ending up where she thought she would: “I was never much of a kid person,” she says matter-of-factly. “I mean, I thought they were cute to look at, but I didn’t want them in my house. She spent a decade in a relationship with actor Ron Eldard without any desire to tie the knot (the two split in 2003), and says she was contentedly single when she met Lieberthal. They were at the nearby SoHo restaurant Raoul’s celebrating the birthday of a mutual friend and just clicked. “But I said, ‘If you’re looking for the marrying type, it’s not gonna be me,’” she recalls. Cut to a year and a half later, when he proposed during a romantic jaunt to Paris. By this point Margulies had abandoned her skepticism about marriage, and happily agreed—and then six days later the couple learned she was pregnant. “It was a total surprise,” she confesses. “But I said, ‘Okay, I guess we’ll roll with it.’”
On her husband, and her son Kieran: “We figured we’d celebrate his father’s Irish side, since the last name is quite Jewish,” she explains, adding, “Yes, my husband’s an Irish Jew. He can think and drink.”
On her character in The Good Wife: “She has this way of looking at both sides of the coin before reacting,” she says. “I don’t have that—for me, it’s black or white; there’s no gray area. And I’m an actress, so emotions are much more on my sleeve.” She relays an anecdote from earlier that day, when she and her friend were attempting to hail a cab. A free, on-duty driver slowed but then saw the two women were with toddlers and sped away, likely turned off by the sight of little ones. “I said, ‘Is this because we have children?’ And then I just yelled ‘You’re a f—ing a–hole!’ Out loud! I gasped—I couldn’t believe I did that in front of my kid and my girlfriend’s kid. I just got so angry. Alicia Florrick would never do that. She would be like, Okay, let me take down the license plate number and file a report.”
On being typecast as “ethnic”: “It’s funny, people always thought I was Greek or Italian—in fact, I’m Jewish,” she says, noting that early on, her looks presented a problem with casting directors who wanted stereotypical American beauty. “But as I’ve gotten older, the less ethnic my roles have become. I don’t know—maybe it’s because I’ve learned to pluck my eyebrows? They used to be really big and bushy.”
On playing a mother of a 20-year-old on a new film: “I know a lot of actresses who turned down Joyce Rizzo because she was the mother of a 20-year-old. Why would I turn down a great role? I mean, talk to me in five years and maybe I’ll be whining that no one will hire me. Maybe now I can only play ‘the mother of,’ never ‘the girlfriend of.’ But I think you have to go with a role because it’s good, not because of what it says about your age.”
On not being too good for television: “When I left ER, people asked me if I’d still do television,” she says. “I’ll always do television—television celebrates women. It’s where the best, richest roles for women are, period.”
On living in New York: “I need four seasons. My family is here, my roots are here. I love sharing my kid with my family because I know no one else is going to care the way I do except them,” she says. “And babies have a way of making people live longer.”
On political wives and sex scandals: “The one that hit me the most was Silda [Spitzer],” she says. “Two months before the whole thing blew up, she looked incredible. And then you saw her standing beside him at that podium, and it looked like she had aged 10 years. And then a year after that, she was in this Vogue article and she looked like a brand-new woman. There was a light in her eyes.”
On how her husband handles her fame: “We met when I was a guest on The Sopranos and doing an Off Broadway play,” she says. “I was off the radar. And now, four years later, he’s like, ‘Whoa!’” Margulies is truly bewildered by stars who draw even further attention to themselves by tweeting: “Why would you want someone to follow you on Twitter? I guess it might feel like a way of existing, if you have insecurity about your existence.”
On auditioning: “When a job ends for an actor, you do wonder when the next job will come,” she says. “I’m not above auditioning.”
On The Good Wife‘s timeslot: “I’m most thrilled that drama is succeeding at 10 o’clock,” she says, before launching into a critique of NBC’s failed decision to put Jay Leno on every weeknight at that hour. “It took away jobs from actors, writers, directors, producers, crew members…. It was a devastating move, and I’m so thrilled it didn’t work out.”
[From W Magazine]
See? She sounds really cool. I’m her fangirl now. I love that she’s become the spokeswoman for 10 p.m. dramas doing well, and that she stuck it to her old ER home, NBC. NBC should still be getting criticism for the Jay Leno debacle. And I still can’t figure out when the new Law & Orders are coming on now that Leno is no longer on at 10 p.m. I think they’re running the repeats at 9, and then the new ones at 10? I can never tell.
W cover and additional photos courtesy of W’s slideshow.
