By Fred Topel | Image property of respective holders.
Gloria Reuben
ER has changed a lot over the years. Back in the Clooney days, we'd never have imagined surgical interns with Parkinson's disease of helicopters falling on amputee surgeons. Original cast member Gloria Reuben returns to ER for a guest starring episode. For her, it was like coming home again.
Reuben Back in the ER
"Honestly I have to say that I haven’t really kept up with the show on a regular basis over the last few years so I’m not really quite sure on how outrageous it has gotten," said Reuben. "This is only for one episode so I can just walk in there knowing that it will be a great deal of fun to reconnect with those whom I do know and make new connections with some of the newer actors or not so new if they’ve been on for two years already. Because it was kind of a brief little stint at this time I could go in and just kind of do my thing and then go. It was a lot of fun even though the story is very, very intense."
Jeannie Boulet was an HIV positive doctor who left the ER in 1999. Returning, she is still surviving with the disease, like many in real life. Bringing this example back to the mainstream was important to Reuben, who does HIV/AIDS work in real life.
"The ball has been dropped even though the numbers specifically in the African American and Latino communities are going through the roof. It’s a pandemic that really has fallen off the radar for the most part in terms of the general media. So it’s wonderful to be able to use the avenue, the role of Jeannie Boulet to keep the message in people’s minds and just kind of remind them a little bit that this hasn’t gone away and it’s actually impacting more people now than it was a few years ago. What an incredible thing to carry along with it this story of Jeannie Boulet from a few years ago, because anybody and everybody who would be involved with HIV/AIDS would know about this storyline. It’s kind of that blessing of being able to have a familiar face that is connected to an issue and then being able to talk about that issue and people may want to listen a little bit more."
On a drama like ER, they were never going to take the easy way out of killing Boulet off. "It really would have kind of defeated the whole four, four and a half seasons of showing Jeannie living with the virus if she just was going to die from it. Frankly I feel like it would have been a betrayal for those who are HIV-positive who are trying to gain some hope in their lives at a time when medicine was at least a good possibility of being able to gain some kind of a life back."
Besides being dramatically too easy, killing off Boulet would have been devastating to real live survivors. "That whole issue of hope alone, if somebody’s HIV-positive and they get emotionally connected to a character whom they’ve been watching for years live with the virus and meet certain challenges and not meet certain challenges and just kind of the what happens on a day to day basis, if by the end of it they see that this person dies from this virus, and yeah it’s just television and yeah, it’s make believe and all of that stuff but I don’t think so. I think it goes deeper than that, especially when it comes to this issue, especially when it comes to the denial and the stigma and still the shame that revolves around this virus to this day even in the most 'progressive' country in the world, in the United States, the huge denial and stigma that’s attached to this virus."
ER returns with Reuben's episode January 3rd on NBC.
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