“She wants the younger generation to be the best-equipped and do the best job they can. Harden feels a connection to her role as Dr. “It’s authenticity with specific intent: to show the humanity behind the chaos,” McGarry said.
The series has bloody and graphic moments, with one procedure in the pilot considered difficult to watch.
The cast includes Luis Guzman ( We’re the Millers), Bonnie Somerville ( NYPD Blue), Raza Jaffrey ( Smash) and William Allen Young ( Moesha).Ĭode Black is distinguished from most other medical dramas, Seitzman and McGarry said, because of its realism and attention to detail: Actual trauma nurses work alongside the performers on and off camera.
McGarry, an executive producer of Code Black, works with showrunner and executive producer Michael Seitzman ( Intelligence). The term code black denotes the moment when the influx of patients overwhelms the hospital staff to the extent that not everyone is properly treated. The series was inspired by an award-winning documentary by physician Ryan McGarry that explores the life-and-death chaos of the nation’s busiest emergency department, at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. The cast is fantastic, and the writing is sublime.” “This is some of the hardest and most interesting work I’ve ever done. It’s a true ensemble of people working together.”Īlthough she has done only a handful of episodes, Harden is already calling Code Black a career highlight. I feel, if it’s not a circle, I don’t want to be in it. “I also don’t think of me being the star. But I talked it over with them, and they said, ‘Go for it, Mom.’ “I’m a single mother, and I have three kids. “I was really nervous, being the lead of a medical drama,” Harden, 56, said recently during a break on the set at the Walt Disney Studios. Leanne Rorish, the residency director of a relentlessly busy emergency room in Los Angeles. Harden heads the Code Black ensemble of veterans and newcomers in the role of Dr. Then, when producers wanted to replace the original lead, Worthington native Maggie Grace ( Taken), they made a change. The pattern almost repeated itself when she was originally cast in the new medical drama Code Black, premiering tonight on CBS.
She received a Tony award in 2009 as lead actress in a play for God of Carnage and last year played the mother of Christian Grey in the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey.įor all her accomplishments, Harden - a co-star of the short-lived ABC sitcom Trophy Wife in 2013-14 - has rarely found herself in leading roles. She has lent a blend of warmth and smooth toughness to recent films ( Grandma) and series ( The Newsroom, How To Get Away With Murder and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit). Such drawbacks seem to have had minimal effect on Harden during the past few years, as she has ridden a steady flow of featured roles in high-profile projects onstage and on-screen. “Suddenly, the parts you’re offered and the money become smaller.
“It’s disastrous on a professional level,” the actress said in 2003, a few years after nabbing a supporting-actress Academy Award for her portrayal of artist Lee Krasner, the wife of troubled painter Jackson Pollock, in Pollock. LOS ANGELES - The winning of an Oscar, Marcia Gay Harden once said, is a double-edged sword.