Julianna Margulies - Sunshine Girl: An Unexpected Life

In the opening scene of the pilot episode of The Good Wife the camera follows the lead character, Alicia Florrick, and her husband, Cook County States Attorney Peter Florrick, down a hotel hallway on their way to a press conference. They are holding hands as the viewer sees them walk in slow motion through double doors to a large banquet hall, where they take their places on the stage: Peter at the podium, Alicia standing a foot behind him to his right. The press faces the stage, flashbulbs from their cameras blasting off every second like artillery from a firing squad.

Peter Florrick announces that he is resigning as states attorney. And while he admits to adultery with prostitutes, he denies there was any mishandling of state funds; all payments came from his own pocket, his only crime was cheating on his wife and throwing his family into the spotlight in such a degrading way. As he speaks the camera zooms in on Alicias face; she is trying to hold herself together, looking only at Peters right shoulder. She focuses on a piece of lint dangling from the upper right arm of her husbands navy blue suit. She slowly lifts her left hand in an effort to remove the small white fleck, and just as she is about to take it, her husband grabs her hand and leads her out of the hall; the press conference is over.

They scurry down the back hallway to a waiting elevator. Alicias eyes are glazed over, a shell-shocked look on her face, revealing to the audience that she is distant to her surroundings. When the elevator doors open the Florricks find themselves in the hotel basement. They walk into the bleak corridor that will lead them to the back exit and into their waiting car. Only a few steps out of the elevator Alicia stops, now staring at the floor. Peter says, Alicia? Are you all right? She looks up and, in one fell swoop of her arm, slaps him hard across the face. She tugs at her blazer, straightening it, takes a deep breath, and walks down the barren corridor alone. Slowly and with strained determination she makes her way to the exit doors only to see through the window the paparazzi lying in wait. Flashbulbs igniting the dank air, buzzards waiting to catch their prey. She takes a few steps back, away from the glaring lights, and leans on the wall praying it will hold the weight of what just happened to her life. She is motionless now, trapped between the gray-painted cinder blocks and the circling vultures. With her head resting on the blank canvas of the wall, she closes her eyes, trying with all her might to disappear. End scene.

After we wrapped, I hung up Alicias wardrobe in my trailer and put on my own comfortable clothing. Usually, when a long day of filming is finished, there is a sense of relief, a time to wind down and relax. I learned a long time ago that you need to leave your work on the set if you want to function as a normal human being in your own life. There have been only a handful of times in my twenty-plus-year career that I havent been able to do that. But as I headed back to my hotel after this scene, I seemed to sink deeper into an acute sadness I hadnt felt in years. There was what felt like an immense weight sitting right in the middle of my chest that I couldnt shake.

When I got back to my room I replayed the scene over and over again in my mind. Sitting upright in a chair, feet planted on the floor, looking at the generic hotel furniture, I tried to understand why I felt so desperately lonely and off-kilter. What had I tapped into that seemed so devastating to me? My own life at the time resembled the exact opposite of that of the woman I was playing. I had never put my career on the back burner for a man as Alicia had done, despite her overwhelming talent as a lawyer. My own life in marriage had just begun, my baby was barely thirteen months old. I was living in that golden light of new love, new life. I had never been happier. And yet that scene haunted me for quite some time. Even years after it aired I still felt a tremendous sense of loss just thinking about it: the characters vulnerability in that moment is colossal, her utter isolation from the world, not knowing the next steps or what lies ahead of her. Her fear of uncharted territory is too frightening to comprehend. I understood all of her feelings, but why couldnt I, the actress playing her, shake them off me at the end of the day, as I had trained myself to do on so many other occasions?

As I dug deeper to try to pull myself out of this sadness, I started to comprehend the familiarity of these feelings. They may not have resulted from a philandering husband, but they had a presence in my life from the day I was born. Even though I may not have seen them or understood them, I unknowingly felt them. When I walked down that hallway as Alicia, those feelings I had buried so deep that I was never fully aware they existed erupted with such a force I was rendered speechless. It was as if they now demanded exploration and examination.

Acting is such a curious profession. What part of ourselves do we bring to a role that makes our portrayal different from someone elses? When an actor is on a long-running television show, especially when the writing is superb, as was the case with The Good Wife, the character becomes a second skin; she grows as you grow, she changes as you change. Being an actress gives me the luxury of discovering myself. All the feelings that came up from playing Alicia allowed me to look back at my life and tap into my own vulnerability. My personal fear of the unknown reared its ugly head as I studied this character, its source most likely from the ever-present unpredictability of my childhood.

This book came about after Id completed the run of