“There’s an honesty to her; there are no tricks,” says Ridley Scott, an executive producer of The Good Wife who insisted on casting Margulies. “You always feel that what she’s delivering is real and straight from the shoulder, and that’s who she is in real life. She appears compassionate, like someone you’d ask for advice. That’s why I wanted her—and apart from that, she’s a hell of a good time at dinner.”
It’s true Margulies inhabits her characters so completely that they can seem a triumph of typecasting rather than talent. For a long time after her six-year run as nurse Carol Hathaway on ER, Margulies was offered nurse and doctor roles almost to the exclusion of anything else. And she is so believable as The Good Wife’s Alicia Florrick, the supremely dignified and self-possessed spouse of a politician caught in a sex scandal, that one expects her to be a bit of a goody-two-shoes in person. “She is the antithesis of that,” says Andy Garcia, her costar in both City Island and 2001’s The Man From Elysian Fields. “She’s gregarious and has a great sense of humor. As an actress she’s extraordinarily flexible; she can do anything—dialects, Shakespeare. But if you do a part well, people think that’s the way you are.”
In fact, Margulies says she wishes she was more like Florrick. “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.”
The outburst is more typical of another Margulies character: City Island’s Joyce Rizzo, a sexy, feisty Italian-American mother of two with a penchant for lipstick and Lycra. It’s a performance that proves Margulies can stretch beyond roles marked by pragmatism. She loved playing Joyce in the summer of 2008, especially in light of the Waspy persona she would take on for The Good Wife a few months later. “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.”
