After filming ‘The Hot Zone,’ cast takes on healthier habits
PASADENA, Calif. — It may seem unusual, but actress Julianna Margulies’ latest role has changed her hygiene habits.
All those years as head nurse Carol Hathaway on “ER” didn’t faze her. But playing real-life Army pathologist Nancy Jaax in National Geographic’s “The Hot Zone” did.
“I definitely wash my hands more, and am very aware of what I’m touching, where things might have been. I now carry wipes in my bag. I never used to do that,” she says.
“The Hot Zone,” a three-night series premiering Memorial Day, is based on Richard Preston’s international best-selling book about the near-catastrophic arrival of the deadly Ebola virus on U.S. shores in 1989. When the silent killer was suddenly discovered in monkeys in a lab 20 miles from Washington, D.C., Jaax risked her life to prevent the spread of the disease to humans.
“It’s also not just the handwashing,” adds Margulies. “I worked with Nancy Jaax’s reallife nephew, who is an infectious disease specialist, one of the top in the field. And he told me that infectious disease specialists never touch their face.
“He said, ‘Now that you know that, you’re gonna watch people and you’re gonna see how many times in five minutes they will touch their face.’ And he said he never gets the flu or sick — maybe once every six years — because he’s not constantly touching his face. So, now I’m always sitting on my hands,” she laughs.
Liam Cunningham (“Game of Thrones”), who portrays a reclusive Ebola expert in “The Hot Zone,” says the show has affected him too. “On a plane, I used to completely ignore coughing,” he says. “I don’t ignore coughing anymore. I try to count the seats, how far this cough is away. And people sweating on public transport, concerns me now.”
Margulies actually met with the real Col. Jaax, who is the chief pathologist of the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases, and was impressed by her humility. “The thing that struck me about her personally was that she just doesn’t see herself as anything but a woman going to work,” says Margulies.
“I look at her character as a hero, because she really emphasized what a threat this was and got the ball rolling to stop it from spreading. But to her, it was just another day at the office, really.”
The fear of the spread of Ebola is not dead, says Margulies. “I remember there were a lot of stories about Ebola the whole time we were shooting. Every day there seemed to be another story about Ebola in small print, which I found really disturbing, that it wasn’t on the front page,” she says.
“I think the biggest issue is that everyone thinks that because Ebola is found in these faraway African villages that it has nothing to do with us here in the U.S. And to see something that happened in 1989, to see that Ebola touched U.S. soil, and that the CDC’s (Centers for Disease Control) reaction to it was basically: We dodged a bullet.
“And the people who were working, the researchers, the pathologists, are all saying, No, no, no, no, no. We didn’t dodge a bullet. We need to find a cure. There’s no cure. There’s nothing you can take. This has a 90 percent fatality rate.’ ”