Marcia Gay Harden Looks Back on ‘SVU,’ ‘The Newsroom’ & More TV Roles (VIDEO)

Meredith Jacobs May 30, 2024, 4:00 pm

Marcia Gay Harden has been all over TV, most recently in So Help Me Todd—which ran two seasons on CBS before it was canceled in April—and she’s had a variety of roles. During a visit to TV Insider’s office, we had her look back on some of her more memorable shows.

Like so many, she has Law & Order: SVU (which has been on for 25 seasons and counting!) among her credits. Harden appeared as “badass” FBI Agent Dana Lewis, as she called her. “It was really, for me, one of the highlights of television,” she shared.

When it comes to The Newsroom, on which she played attorney Rebecca Halliday, her memories are “Aaron Sorkin, Aaron Sorkin, Aaron Sorkin, and Jeff Daniels. I remember the first read through, Jeff said, ‘You want to know the secret of Aaron Sorkin?'” Harden recalled. “He said, ‘Know your lines. Memorize your lines.’ And I had this monologue, and so I went home and I practically memorized the monologue for the table read-through, just so I knew where my beats were and I knew what to do. And I just remember Jeff looking across at me going, yeah, thumbs up.”

For three seasons, Harden played Dr. Leanne Rorish on the medical drama Code Black. “It was so much heart and so much emergency room lingo and so many people. Really, my biggest memory of Code Black, the outstanding memory, is the extras. There were so many extras in that one little teeny room where we did all those surgeries,” she said. “And from the extras to us, we had to know the medicine. We had to be able to kind of almost ad-lib during a thoracotomy. … It was just exciting and high energy sometimes, so much so that you’d actually think you were doing a surgery, you’d have to go, ‘I’m an actor. I know I’m an actor.’ Because you’d get in the moment, ‘Hey, give me the scalpel now, they’re going to die.'”