Code Black’s Marcia Gay Harden

Oscar-winning actress Marcia Gay Harden talks to TV Drama about her role on Code Black as Residency Director Dr. Leanne Rorish, who is tasked with keeping the chaos under control in an overburdened system while training first-year residents and saving lives.

The feature documentary Code Black, which offers an eyewitness account of doctors making split-second life-and-death decisions in America’s busiest emergency room in L.A. County Hospital, served as inspiration for the eponymous drama series that airs on CBS. The show features the stories, struggles and ambitions of doctors who, when resources in the E.R. are stretched to the limit by the high volume of patients, have to work under the “code black” alert.

Marcia Gay HardenTV DRAMA: How did you hear about the show and what appealed to you about the concept?
HARDEN: They brought me the documentary and I was initially slated to play a different character. When I looked at the documentary, I thought it was amazing and so realistic. And truly, what stood out was the compassion of the doctors. In such a short period of time—it’s an emergency room situation—[they show] incredible compassion for the patients that they just briefly got to know. The doctors’ stamina, their camaraderie with each other, their sense of self-importance—but in the right way, they’re saving lives—and yet there’s an incredible humility at the same time. I love that. And when it didn’t work out with the other actor who was [supposed to play] Dr. Leanne Rorish, they offered the part to me. She was a much better fit for me than the character I was doing. I loved Rorish’s command, her vulnerability and her impatience. Mostly, I loved her recklessness. I thought, How interesting to take a woman who has suffered loss and who is in this very important job with life-and-death situations. She’s gotten a little bit reckless in the name of saving lives, and she’s often right. Sometimes you have to take those risks, you have to think that fast. And sometimes, those risks fall short. And what does that do? What does that mean? What is the toll?

TV DRAMA: Do you feel the intensity and the stress of the doctor that you’re portraying to the point that it affects you also as an actor?
HARDEN: Absolutely. And I love that question because I only recently began to do research about stress levels in the body. My mother has Alzheimer’s, and [I’ve looked into] stress and Alzheimer’s, stress and heart disease, stress and weight, and how they’re all related. And I got to thinking, you really go through it if you’re acting. My school of training is to really go through it, whether you’re on stage or in a movie or on television. So what am I doing to the stress levels in my body or my brain? And how does that affect me? My kids say, Mom, you were so much grumpier when you came home at night while you were shooting Code Black. I was so much more stressed because I had been in that situation all day. And I thought, I’m going to have to really work on demarcating the two [work and my personal life] and leave [the stress] at the office. But it’s hard because it’s in your body. Deepak Chopra and Oprah Winfrey have meditations that I listen to. They’re 20 minutes, and I listen to them to try to allow my brain to separate from the job.

TV DRAMA: What different acting muscles does a long-running series stretch compared to working on a feature film?
HARDEN: The difference between doing a film or a play and doing a long-running series is that [in a TV series] you don’t own your story. When I read a film, I own my story beginning, middle and end. I know what it is. The same [is true] in the theater, I own it beginning, middle and end; it’s defined. In television, you don’t own it at all. So there’s a whole part of your brain that might have to do with structure and control that you have to disallow because you don’t own your story. And who you are one day [can change] the next day because someone can throw you a different circumstance. I experienced it for the first time during Damages [playing the character Claire Maddox]. I thought, Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa! How does that correlate? I would never have thought that my character wanted to be the CEO of a major company. I’ve built a whole idea that my character didn’t want to do that and [then] something [happened to change] that idea. Or in Law & Order: SVU I built a whole character based on honor, honor, honor, honor; my father’s in the Navy, honor, honor, honor. In the last episode I did, they said, Oh, by the way, [your character] killed someone many years ago and has lied about it for years. I’m like, No she didn’t! I can’t correlate that. And they said, Do you want to play it or not? And I said, OK. So I could be thrown something in Code Black that I would never have expected from my character because they’re creating it as they go along. For me, that’s the biggest difference.

TV DRAMA: Anything you can tease about season two?
HARDEN: A wonderful new doctor, played by Boris Kodjoe, will be on. A wonderful, new, young doctor, played by Jillian Murray, will be on. [Since this interview, it has been announced that Rob Lowe will be joining the cast.] Raza [Jaffrey] and Bonnie [Somerville] have made other career moves. They are fantastic, intelligent, smart and compassionate and we’ll miss them hugely. My character was in [hospital] administration for a while but I think she’s back in the E.R. now, which [I’m happy about] because one of the things that I love about Leanne is she’s a great teacher. And you track the story—will the interns make it or will they not make it—through Leanne and senior nurse Jesse Sallander, played by Luis Guzmán. So I think it’s good to keep them at the center of these ancillary doctors. But I don’t really know where it’s going yet. This is it. I don’t own the story; I have no idea!