“To me, love is always an exciting story to tell.”

When Jorja Fox looks back on her career, it’s with a great deal of affection for the character of CSI’s Sara Sidle, the crime scene investigator who she played for 296 episodes of the original long-running CBS series. The procedural juggernaut, which premiered in 2000 and gave birth to multiple spinoffs, has returned home in 2021 for CSI: Vegas, which features Fox returning as Sara.

Also returning for CSI: Vegas is William Petersen as Gil Grissom, with whom Sara had a long-running love affair that, as last seen in the original series, united the two characters for a classic happily-ever-after. So I had two things I wanted to ask Fox about in this one-on-one interview — for one thing, what it meant to her not just to return to the show, but to do so with Petersen along. But also, I was very curious about the choice she had to make in 2000, when the opportunity to join the cast of CSI came up while she was still a recurring player on another television juggernaut: the Emmy-winning The West Wing, in which she played Secret Service agent Gina Toscano, assigned to protect Presidential daughter Zoey Bartlet (Elisabeth Moss).

Fox had plenty to say on both topics and more, including how Aaron Sorkin reacted to the news of her leaving The West Wing, and what her first day on the CSI set was like (and how it differed from her first day shooting CSI: Vegas). She also revealed what her favorite CSI parodies are, and why she doesn’t mind the tricky scientific jargon of the CSI dialogue.

Collider: So I want to start off not by asking you about coming on to CSI: Vegas, but what happened in 2000, when you made the leap from The West Wing to the original CSI. Do you remember much about the chain of events that happened there?

JORJA FOX: Yes. Gosh. You know, it was a huge moment in my life, so of course, I remember it all very well. I had been on Season 1 of The West Wing. I was the happiest actor in America. It was the coolest job, and working with the most incredible people.

We had this big shootout at the end, of course, with the assassination [attempt] of President Bartlett. The audience was left wondering if anybody was going to survive. You didn’t know who was going to make it and who wasn’t. And I had heard about the show CSI — I had a couple of friends say, “Hey, have you read this pilot?” And I said, “No, no, no. I got this great job. I’m not looking for a job.”

And then my manager eventually called and said, “Maybe you should check out this CSI show. They’re adding a character.” And I was like, “No, no. I’m really not interested. I really love West Wing, and I’m going back.” And then finally somebody else pointed it out. So I was like, “All right.” I read it. And then once I read it, I was like, “Wow, shoot. Wow, I’ve got to, maybe, at least go try and go meet everybody, because this is a really amazing character in this very cool show.” And I really didn’t expect to get the job. When I drove to the screen test for CSI, I was in my car kind of hoping that I didn’t get it because I wanted to stay on West Wing. Then I got the job, and it turned out to be this incredible thing for me.

Aaron Sorkin did say to me, he was like, “Hey, good luck on The District, but if it’s canceled, call me and we’ll put you back on The West Wing.” I didn’t even correct him. I was like, it’s not The District. I was like, “Cool, thanks Aaron,” and I thought I’d be back on The West Wing by the holidays. I really did. I didn’t think anybody was going to be that interested in a show about science and death on a Friday night. I just thought it would be really kind of cool for a couple of months. And I’d be back on West Wing by the end of the year.

Did Aaron tell you anything that he had planned for the character if you had stayed on?

FOX: He did not. And I think, I mean, I know that I survived the assassination. That his intention was that I would survive. CSI let me out to just do a couple of days filming, because they had left it with this big cliffhanger, so they allowed me to go back and do a couple of scenes just to establish that the character was still alive, in the event that I ultimately came back. But of course, we got to watch Elisabeth Moss and Dule Hill, we got to see their storyline for several years. What an amazing play that would have been. So I can only dream about all the protecting of them I could have gotten to do, if I had not gone to CSI.

You could have been the wise person saying, “Maybe don’t date that French guy.”

FOX: Yes, exactly. It was a great job for me, and it was such an honor to be a part of it. It was just a really exciting time. It was a presidential election year. We were in DC a lot. I got to go to a White House Correspondents Dinner. Never in my life did I imagine I’d be a person who would get to be in an event like that. So, I missed it from the moment that I left. And I watched it for many years after. But I’ve got to say that I feel like, wow, CSI is definitely the best thing that ever happened to me professionally.

One of the reasons I loved that job for me was because Aaron Sorkin wrote just incredible monologues for actors. Five, six, seven-page monologues that were just amazing. And I got to be on The West Wing, and I just would get to say stuff like, “Stand back. Get in the car.” I was like, “Whew. I’m so lucky,” because I’m not good at long monologues.

Well, I’m glad you landed on a show where the dialogue doesn’t have any tricky elements.

FOX: Yep, I know. Well, the thing about CSI is, most of the scenes are so short, so you might get a bunch of science in a scene, and I would get anxiety about that for a day or so, but most of the scenes are half a page, or a page. Not like the monster scenes of Aaron Sorkin, or even on ER, where there might be literally three or four straight pages of medical dialogue. We had a lot of quick cuts on CSI. So that was very helpful. It’s more for the MTV generation.

So I imagine that your first day on the set of the first CSI was pretty different from your first day on this new CSI. What was it like?

FOX: Well, I’m a bit older, and I had the great fortune of playing a character that I know very well, the second time around. Weirdly enough, for me like, getting into Sara Sidle is as easy as putting on a certain jacket, or a certain belt. I don’t know that I would have thought, as an actor, that I would ever experience that. Getting to know a character so long and so well that it’s just really easy to sort of go in and out of that.

My first day on CSI: Vegas was with Paula Newsome in the morning. We started out just the two of us. And that was really great because she’s got incredible energy. She’s inspiring. She’s fun. She’s an incredible actress also, obviously. And then by later in the afternoon, almost the entire cast joined us for a couple of scenes.

So that was really a unique experience, too. Usually when you start a series, for at least two or three days they try to keep just two actors in a scene, or three. They try to keep things really simple. And by the afternoon we were in a storage shed, and it was about 111 degrees. And Mandeep Dhillon, and Jay Lee, and it was Paula and me, and they had these kids doing science right away on the first day in the heat.

It was amazing perspective for me to be in the room, and just get to enjoy these guys learning how to do this whole thing. It was very challenging: to connect, and have lines. And I got to be the one that could just kind of stand there and really just take it all in, and really be grateful. And my first day 20 years ago was definitely not that sort of relaxed and grounded. It was the very first day of the series with Gary Dourdan and myself 20 years ago. And our call time was 3:30 in the morning for some reason. I’ll never know why. And it was also really hot, and it was also in Santa Clarita, and ended up being a 16, or an 18 hour day.

Both days, I think, the thing that they have in common was like, wow, I don’t know how we’re going to do this. You get your two or three scenes out on the first day, and you know that eventually you’ve got to be doing five, or six, or seven scenes a day. But that never, ever, ever gets old. I think that’s part of the magic of getting to do film and TV is, in the morning you look at sort of what you’re going to get done with 80 other people, or 90. And you look at this thing and you’re like, this is never going to happen. There’s no way we’re going to pull this off. And yet you almost always do. It’s just magic.

How key to you was it that it was not just going to be you coming back, but also with William Peterson?

FOX: It was really key for me story-wise, in the sense that we had, for me, this amazing sort of happy ending. We just sailed off into the sunset together. The characters were together. And for me, one of the big, big story arcs for my character was this love affair that played out over 15 years. So it would have been almost impossible for me to imagine returning without Gil Grissom. For Sara to come back without Gil Grissom, in a sense, would have meant that, once again something had happened to that relationship. That it had ended or fallen apart. And that would have been really tough. I think I’m really attached, Jorja’s really attached to the idea of Sara and Grissom, if they were going to return, to return together.

As a longtime fan of TV shows with will-they-or-won’t-they relationships, I feel like the thing I can’t stand is when people say, “Oh, if they get together then the show’s over.”

FOX: Thank you so much.

Especially when what’s really compelling sometimes is just, here’s a couple in a relationship doing their job.

FOX: Yeah. I mean, it’s really fun and interesting for me. Weirdly enough, I realized that my longest relationship is a make-believe relationship. My character with another character. To get tell the story of any couple that sort of made it 20, 21 years, I think, is super interesting and exciting. They’ve been through so much together. Even coming out of a pandemic, it’s been a really intense couple of years, I think for everyone. And I think that most of us, at some time or another, have quietly examined love in our lives. Whether we have this great love in our lives, or we don’t, or we want to get love in our lives, or we want to get the hell away from the love in our lives. People at one time or another have sort of had to really think very clearly about that in their lives.

And so to me love is always an exciting story to tell. To tell it within the range of CSI, because it is such a dark world, and it’s such a heavy world… The idea that love can survive through that, and last, it never gets old to me. And just to get the opportunity to actually, that Sara and Grissom are going to be together on screen, because we really were, even though they were married, they were divorced, they were together, they were running away from each other. We didn’t see much of that, actually, on screen. As they return together, you’re going to see this couple come back, and that’s fun to me.

To wrap things up, there have been a lot of parodies and homages to CSI over the years. Do you have any particular favorites, or do you kind of try to avoid all of that?

FOX: You know, I’m a big Stephen Colbert fan. Like real big. And my favorites are typically when he’s sort of making fun of CSI. He’ll use it from time to time in his comedic routines. And it’s just really an honor when I see that that happens.

Also, Drew Barrymore did a really awesome spoof on CSI, in her first Charlie’s Angels movie, and that’s one of my favorites, also.