CBSShe plays America's best-known "good wife" on CBS' The Good Wife. And now, Julianna Margulies is opening up to E! News, talking about the most recent Anthony Weiner debacle, how the resurgence of the scandal (and the latest news on Eliot Spitzer) may affect season five of her successful CBS series—plus how she personally feels about the actions of Weiner's wife Huma Abedin and Spitzer's wife Silda.
Here's what Margulies just said in a sitdown today with E! News:
With the recent Spitzer and Weiner scandals, how do you feel as someone who has played The Good Wife for five years now? Some people were saying the Weiner press conference looked almost identical to the scene in the first episode with you standing by your cheating man [Chris Noth].
Julianna Margulies: I would never want to benefit from someone else's pain but I have been emailing [our producers] for two weeks now. It is the gift that just keeps on giving. It is shocking that in our fifth season, this show is more relevant than ever. It's amazing that my character is a character that women are looking to for answer as to how she feels about it. Alicia's advice to the wives would be, "Go back to work. Don't open the paper. Don't watch TV."
And your advice?
As Julianna, I have absolutely no judgment. Standing up at the podium, I'm sure you're having an out-of-body experience. You are not in your body. You're not in a rational thought place. You are up here looking down saying, ‘What do I do now? How do I put one foot in front of the other?' So I feel like everyone is jumping to conclusions with Weiner's wife Huma. We don't know what's happening behind closed doors.
If I have learned one thing from this character it is, ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged.' You're not in her shoes. My guess is that it will be like with Silda Spitzer. The second he entered back into the political arena, she filed for divorce. I don't blame her.
Huma [Weiner] has a one-year-old baby. We don't know what her daily life is like. And we don't know what he's saying to her. We see him how he wants us to see him as a politician, I mean, I don't think he wants us to see him as a sextster. [Laughs] But I don't know if he goes home at night and gets down on his knees and says, ‘Help me deal with this problem.' It benefits our show, the writers just happen to tap into that on this show and I get to play her.
Since this show played off of the Spitzer scandal, how do you feel that he's now trying to get back in office?
It's funny that Peter Florrick [Chris Noth] gets reelected at the end of last season and Spitzer goes back into politics. It's like, ‘You must be kidding! He must watch the show!' It really feels like at first, art was imitating life, and now life is imitating art.
Will the recent Weiner and Spitzer stories influence the season five storylines?
I can't imagine it not.