Jorja Fox Plays Sara Sidle

“I am upstaged all the time by pieces of carpet fibre!”

Jorja Fox is probably best known for her TV work - she had a starring role on ER as Dr Maggie Doyle and a recurring part on The West Wing as Agent Gina Toscano. On film, she can be found in smaller films such as Dead Funny, Velocity Trap and appears as Catherine Shelby in Memento. CSI’s Sara Sidle is a recovering alcoholic who has appeared since the very first show. A dedicated, driven forensic scientist, she nevertheless finds her personal life occasionally affecting her professional career.

You seem to enjoy playing Sara…

I love that I’m playing someone who’s worlds smarter than I am and that is always a good reason to get out of bed: “I went to Harvard and Berkeley and studied physics, nuclear fission…” But there are times where it’s not so easy! I was on a roof scene this week for about three hours. They didn’t put me on the roof, I was on a set that they built that was about four feet off the ground but I still had to wear a harness, which felt really silly because I’m an adult, so there are days where it’s really hard work. But, how cool is it that I get paid to do that? It never ceases to amaze me.

Do you feel like the show is more about the crime than the people sometimes?

I am upstaged all the time by pieces of carpet fibre! They’ll spend two hours lighting carpet fibre and ten minutes lighting us. I think it’s really great, though, because I our hope is that people who like the show will always want to know more about the characters and you reveal it a little bit like snapshots. So I would much rather do that every week than a show where you’re just purging constantly. I think the longevity and mystery of it, I think there’s still a lot of mystery around a lot of the characters and I’d like to believe that that at least partly keeps people tuning in.

Do you enjoy the character work?

I think we all get really excited and also it’s kind of scary, especially if you’re going some place that the show hasn’t gone so much before. I felt I’ve been really lucky in that way, I’ve got to be the guinea pig a couple of times. So it’s amazing and fun and terrifying and I’m always just crossing my fingers and hoping that it works. It’s been really nice to see a lot of the other characters do that this year and it also makes Sara a little less crazy. Everybody else is having breakdowns!

Is it true you were holding out for more money at the start of Season Five, or was that just rumours?

I wasn’t holding out for more money, I merely wanted a raise (laughs). I, who had been spoiled enough to come from ER and West Wing before I came to this show, had only really known that as an example of how things worked, so it’s a very normal thing in the television business that if a show is doing really well that every two years, many of the cast, including the crew and other people, will go in and ask for a raise. Anything can happen from that, and I’m sure you’ve seen some really dramatic stuff on TV where people really hold out for it, in this case nothing like that happened - they invited George and I not to come to work, and then they changed their minds.

Here comes the science bit…CSI is loaded with technological terms that the cast have to trip off their tongues at speed every week. How do you handle it?

I don’t like to read the scripts too late in the day, they give me the creeps. I used do it a lot before bed because I like to read them straight through and that’s the time of the day that it’s quiet and the phone stops ringing, but it’s also the time that, I’ve had nightmares many times!