WILLOWS’ PEAK
TV Zone: CSI Special Edition
Unknown 2005
by Jenny Eden
Marg Helgenberger tells Jenny Eden how her ‘CSI’ role is a headstrong mix of brains and beauty.
‘Desperate Housewives’ has got all the credit for proving that you can be sexy after 40, but ‘CSI’’s Marg Helgenberger has been doing it for years. As stripper-turned-scientist Catherine Willows in ‘CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,’ Marg has brought glamour to the crime lab. She’s sparked a desire to become forensics experts in girls around the world, while guys are tuning in in the hope that she’ll one day go back to her old pole dancing job. In the name of crime-solving, of course.
At 44, the actress says she’s thrilled to see more strong roles in television being written for women over 40. “I think television is changing,” she says, “but I can’t really say that for movies, unfortunately. In movies it’s always women of 30 and below being paired up with guys who’re 50 and above. It’s such a weird double standard. But I think the difference in television is because there’s so many female viewers who want to see stronger, more mature women.”
But it’s not just older women who are fans of Willows, as Helgenberger’s been overwhelmed by the number of girls who’ve told her she’s their role model. “The most touching responses I get come from 10 and 11-year-old girls who come up to me and say ‘I want to become a criminologist because of you.’ The character has hit a chord with them.”
Perhaps that’s because Catherine has become one of the most well rounded characters in all the different versions of the ‘CSI’ franchise. While her boss Gil Grissom’s life revolves around the job, Catherine has a clearly defined personal life away from the crime lab. She used to work as a sexy dancer at a Las Vegas bar before getting a job as a lab technician and working her way up to qualify as a Crime Scene Investigator. She’s got a manipulative, abusive ex-husband who left her with no money and a cocaine habit, and her dad is one of the town’s club owners. In addition to this, she’s constantly juggling her job with bringing up her daughter Lindsey…though work and family can cross over. For instance, when faced with a burst of teenage rebellion, Catherine resorts to drastic tactics of taking her daughter to the city morgue to hammer home the dangers of hitch-hiking. As Helgenberger comments, “I want to make sure that I do right by the character, because there are a lot of people out there that are expecting a lot more out of me. Catherine’s a single mother with a past that she’s not afraid to admit. But she’s smart, she’s a role model, she’s confident and sexy. I’m always telling the producers to take me out of the lab. I like doing action as well as emotion. One of my favourite episodes to film was where she had to rescue her daughter from a car in a reservoir. Last year I asked them to give her a guy to have fun with, which they did. This year I think we’ll see different sides of Catherine. I think there are many layers to come with her.”
Developing Catherine’s character has been crucially important to Helgenberger. In a show where the science is the star, she admits it can be difficult for the actors to make their mark. “From time to time it gets kind of boring because the whole show is about pushing the plot forward. But that’s also the challenge, to make it about each of our thought processes, so it’s about what do we think about solving the crime and evidence. Every season is a bit more revelatory about the characters.” And she admits that she gets a kick from solving the puzzles in the shows while she’s working on the scripts. “I actually have a fairly logical brain, I don’t know if that’s the German in me, but I can sort of suss out the illogical places in the stories and cases that we are doing. The producers are pretty appreciative of that because writing the show takes so much time and energy and resourcing and researching to come up with these plots, that they can miss a few things that don’t tie together.”
Marg, who has been married to actor Alan Rosenberg for 15 years and has a 14-year-old son, Hughie, studied acting at college and has worked constantly, shunning easy roles in favour of tougher characters. She’s gone from musical theatre to Soap and to playing a heroin addicted prostitute but it was her role as a woman whose cancer-stricken family helped ‘Erin Brockovich’ uncover important evidence, in the Oscar-winning 2000 film, that really got her noticed. Studio executives, casting for the first series of ‘CSI,’ asked her to audition for them and she proved just what they were looking for. “I either play cops or criminals, I’m either on the right side of the law or the wrong side. I gravitate toward edgier material because it suits my nature. I find it fascinating to play. I’m just that kind of person.”
It’s a career choice that’s finally paid off for, as well as filming ‘CSI,’ she’s just starred with Dennis Quaid and Scarlet Johansson in the movie ‘In Good Company.’ However Marg admits at first she had no idea ‘CSI’ was going to be such a massive hit and a big break to her. It was a trip to New York during the first series that made her realize how popular the show was and she ended up breaking the good news to the rest of the cast. She says: “I was flipped out by how many people stopped me on the street and said, ‘We love the show.’ I went back to L.A., and I called up Jerry Bruckheimer and [said] this show is turning into a phenomenon. It was like bam, bam, it happened like that. The fact that we’re number one and we’re beloved throughout the world is unbelievable. It means that all this hard work and long hours is really paying off.”
But it’s not just the hours that are hard work, like the rest of the ‘CSI’ cast Marg has done her research. She’s talked to real CSIs about the job and visited a morgue to watch an autopsy. But she was grimly determined not to let anyone guess her horror at what she was seeing. She says: “I showed up in the coroner’s office and the morgue was literally a chamber of horrors because there were corpses everywhere. But the coroner gave me an A-plus because he said there were big, bulky cops who came in there and passed out.”
It isn’t just the blood and guts that have been an eye-opener, either. She says: “There was one case we did in the fetish club and I learned an awful lot about fetish clubs. I always assumed it was about sex but that’s rarely it, it’s usually about dominance and humiliation. It was bizarre to me, something I couldn’t relate to, but you have to hold your tongue and not be judgemental about it. There was another episode about snuff films, which is disturbing but it’s also kind of fascinating because it is so dark. I think if you don’t want to know anything about those kinds of things you are in denial.”
But even back in the safety of the set things can get pretty nasty. A show’s special effects department works flat out to make sure everything looks as stomach churningly real as possible. “People ask me if I get creeped out by the effect,” she says. “The prosthetic make up can be pretty gory and my son loves that kind of thing. But then you see an actor who is practically dismembered smoking a cigarette in a break. It’s the stories themselves I find disturbing because it’s so sad that many of them are based on reality and have happened to somebody. If you have been to a morgue and witnessed an autopsy nothing says reality like that. It makes you think about your priorities and what’s important in life.”
*Special thanks to Kelly Willows for transcribing this article. A scan can be found here.
