‘Every Episode Was the Real Stuff’

“One of the things that I’m most proud of, if not the most proud of, is that Jeanie Boulet walked out of that ER,” Gloria Reuben says, looking back on the NBC medical drama that aired for 15 seasons (1994-2009) and of which she was a part for six seasons. (She was also nominated for two Emmys for her work on ER, for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 1997 and 1998.)

ER just celebrated the 15th anniversary of its series finale (April 2, 2009), but people are still watching it today, thanks to it being available on Hulu and Max. “I’m super proud because it’s still a hit today,” Reuben (who’s now recurring on Elsbeth and The Equalizer) tells TV Insider. “It stands alone as one of the all-time best medical shows ever, and I’m very humble and very proud to have been a part of it.”

Like us, she loved Jeanie Boulet. “She was really brave and was navigating a terrain that no one else had before on television and certainly in that hospital, being HIV positive, being a married professional woman of color who contracted HIV from her husband in the mid-’90s, that on its own was groundbreaking,” Reuben recalls. “It really helped blow open the doors about who gets HIV and how they get it and all of that. And so for Jeanie to navigate her way as a wife, as a physician assistant in her personal professional life, she doesn’t stay with her husband Al [Michael Beach], and what happened next in her personal life, it was intense and beautiful at the same time.”

It’s a role she remains proud of to this day and says she always will, “because of how it helped reduce the stigma and the shame and the misinformation about HIV and AIDS for all time. And I have to say that one of the things that I’m most proud of, if not the most proud of, is that Jeanie Boulet walked out of that ER,” she continues. “She did not die from AIDS. She walked out of that ER after having remarried and adopted a baby. Because you know what? At that time, late ‘90s medicine was helping people. It was literally giving people with HIV their lives back, many of them. So we were like, and I specifically was like, she’s going to walk out of there alive. She came back a number of years later [in Season 14]. Jeanie Boulet, I’m so proud of myself. I know I sound a little arrogant, but I really, it’s the bigger thing of it all.”

For Reuben, its continued popularity and success hinges on the characters and the medicine, which she says “was real. Actual ER doctors were on set every day. We had the real people there, [to say something] if we were handing something over that we shouldn’t be in one of the emergency rooms or saying a medicine wrong or whatever it may be,” she explains. “Everything technically was right. It was as if you were walking into an actual ER. There was groundbreaking camera work, no question about it, for sure.”

It also comes down to the writing and the “exquisitely-written” characters, for the actress. “There was no melodrama. It was all real drama, which can be subtle and nuanced and intense and quiet. It was just the quietness of it. Sometimes there’d just be shots of whomever it may be—Mark Greene [Anthony Edwards] or George Clooney [as Doug Ross], Dr. Benton [Eriq La Salle], any of them—just like at the end of the day, the real stuff. That’s what ER was. It was the real stuff. Every episode was the real stuff.”

ER, Complete Series, Streaming Now, Hulu and Max