Ebola miniseries is all monkey business

Julianna Margulies swore off medical dramas after her six-year run as nurse Carol Hathaway on NBC’s “ER,” renowned for its frenetic pace, dizzying array of diseases and lab-coat flirtations.

But she’s back in the genre on Nat Geo’s miniseries “The Hot Zone,” about the origins of the Ebola virus. It will air over three consecutive nights starting Monday at 9 p.m.

“I had vowed to not take another show with medical dialogue,” she says. “It’s frustrating when you don’t know what you’re talking about.” But after reading the first scripts for “The Hot Zone” — based on Richard Preston’s 1994 nonfiction bestseller — Margulies, 52, decided to plunge headlong into the terrifying world of Ebola.

She plays now-retired Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax, a now retired army veterinary pathologist who works at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Reston, VA (changed to Ft. Detrick, Maryland for the series).

One day at work, Jaax receives a Styrofoam container that holds an engorged human blood clot wrapped in aluminum foil. She initially thinks it’s infected with simian hemorrhagic fever. “Wherever this guy came from it could wipe out the entire colony,” says Jaax.

To conduct further tests, she dons a biohazard suit and industrial- strength boots and descends to the most sterilized levels of the facility. In the process, she spills some blood tainted with the Ebola virus on her uniform and glove. A cut on her finger, from preparing Thanksgiving dinner, sends Jaax to a decontamination chamber, where she must shower and communicate with her furious superiors through a window. Despite this breach of protocol, she experiments further on monkeys to see if Ebola is really on US soil. What she discovers will curl your hair.

Until Margulies stepped into that biohazard suit, an exact replica of period uniforms, she says she “didn’t realize how claustrophobic” she was. “They weighed 50 pounds. In order to keep the air circulating, there is a fan embedded in the back of the suit,” she says, making it necessary for her to use hand signals to communicate with her co-stars and camera personnel: “You can’t hear anything except a constant whirr.”

One woman’s claustrophobia was another’s “happy place,” says the former “Good Wife” star. “I wanted to claw the suit off me and hide. I e-mailed Nancy [Jaax] and asked, ‘How you did do your job in those places? In those suits?’ ” Jaxx’s reply was simple: “That was where I could do my life’s work and it was quiet.”

Nevertheless, Margulies felt compelled to send a picture of herself in the biohazard suit to Dan Lawson, the “Good Wife” costume designer. “He sent it back with a strand of pearls on it,” she says, laughing.

“The Hot Zone” also delves into Jaax’s marriage to Jerry Jaax (Noah Emmerich), whose specialty was laboratory animal medicine.

“They are like-minded people,” Margulies says. “If you don’t understand each other’s work at such high stakes, I don’t see how the marriage stays together.”

In the six-part series (two episodes per night), Margulies is seen (along with co-star Liam Cunningham of “Game of Thrones”) interacting with several spitting monkeys. Some of that was CGI, the rest handled by puppeteers.

“There were three guys, all in black, behind the monkey cage,” she says. “You could see the breath of the monkey and that was made by special effects people. They weren’t real.”

Margulies hopes that the show “sheds a spotlight on science deniers. It’s shocking to me that we’re having a measles outbreak in 2019. It’s devastating.”

Source: Read Full Article