As CSI’s Sara Sidle, she has her hands full of blood, bugs and rotting parts - but Fox’s passion for acting gives her the stomach to cope, as she explains to Jenny.

Over the last five years, CSI has been responsible for some of TV’s goriest scenes. From bone cracking autopsies to flesh piercing special effects and horrific murders, there.s no holding back when it comes to blood and guts. Yet star Jorja Fox, who plays Sara Sidle, admits that after five years the realistic looking bodies can still ruin her stomach.

“I’m especially queasy and weak and sensitive to it,” she says. “it’s not just how gross and graphic it is, but it’s the way in which it happened, that somebody horribly killed someone else. And God forbid we’re doing a case that’s based on a real story, that adds a whole other dimension to how bad I feel. It’s like the violence of the crime is more repulsive to me than the graphicness of whatever we’re showing. So it’s not just peeling a face back in a coroner’s office, far grosser to me is how the person got to be there.”

If the blood isn’t bad enough then there’s always the bugs. When actors say never act with children or animals, no one mentions insects, but with the crucial clue of many of the show’s cases being the bugs at the crime scene the cast have had to cope with plenty of creepy crawly encounters.

“We’ve lost the evidence a lot,” says Fox. “Bugs are tough, they’re really hard to catch and you’re trying not to hurt them at the same time. And they come with their own wrangler so there’s no harming of insects on this show.”

The 37 year old actress was already a familiar face on TV when CSI gave her a job. She’d had a recurring role as Dr. Maggie Doyle on ER, then she’d become one of President Bartlet’s secret service bodyguards in The West Wing, while staring in the critically acclaimed movie, Memento. Fox had started off as a model after being talent spotted in a shopping mall near her Florida home, but her passion for acting and stature in the industry now means she can work with her own company, Honeypot Productions alongside CSI. “I’m going to be finishing my ninth consecutive year on network television in the States and that’s a really, really good run for anyone.”

But that run almost came to an end at the start of the last season, as she faced unemployment after being temporarily sacked from CSI.

At first I though it was kind of a joke but then, after four or five days, I started to realize it was serious," she says. “I think I probably feel a lot less safe about anything having to do with a show, and I think that’s probably a good thing, I mean change is inevitable in life. But the rest of what happened was half of the cast was working with a pay raise, and half of the cast was not. I think that’s not necessarily good for anybody on the show.”

Fox’s character has faced a tough time on the show as Sara has battled booze alongside a king-sized crush on her boss Gil Grissom. They are some of the few scant insights that have been allowed into her character’s personal life, but Fox believes part of the appeal of the show is based on the old fashioned idea of good against bad that’s the foundation of the storylines.

“The CSIs go out there and really try and make peace and make truth using their minds and their hearts, you know. It’s like an outlaw sort of gunslinger idea without the gun,” she muses.

“I think we will go back to very story-driven CSIs at the start of the new season because all the characters, almost everybody on the show, went through something deeply personal and sort of painful last year. So we’ll wipe that out for a while and probably do a lot of blowing things up and exciting chase scenes.”

But that doesn’t mean the ‘Will they - won’t they?’ romance between Sara and Grissom is off the agenda entirely. “I think the ball is in Grissom’s court at the moment,” says Fox. “I think that Sara’s made a decision that she’s gonna make. She chased him for about two seasons. I think there’s definitely a possibility that something might happen between the two of them before it’s all over. But she’s so smart, she’s so good at the job. But when it comes to matters of the heart, or of friends or personal life, she’s completely awkward and uneducated.”

Like the other members of the original CSI cast, Fox admits she had reservations about the two spin-off series. With both Miami and New York competing for the viewers hears all the Las Vegas crew expressed doubts about the wisdom of created three rival CSIs. But Fox admits that, despite their fears, all the series seem to have found their own niche.

“I think if you offer somebody a really great piece of cake, they’re going to take it. But then if they’re offered cake every day, you might start to want ice cream. I may have wished, you know, that there weren’t any spin-offs of CSI but I think that the shows have been able to sort of find their own legs.”