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| Marg Helgenberger |
The moment snuck up on her, she says now.
“I thought I was okay,” she says of leaving the hit show. “Clearly, I’m still processing it.”
Helgenberger filmed her last episode on the game-changing procedural drama more than month ago. The final episode will air Wednesday at 10 p.m.
“I’m sure there will be times when it will overwhelm me,” she says. “It was a fifth of my life. There were some seasons where I felt I spent more time with my ‘CSI’ family than my own, which I have a lot of guilt about.”
Helgenberger plays Detective Catherine Willows on the show and has been there since it launched Oct. 6, 2000. The series, about a group of crime scene investigators in Las Vegas, made procedural dramas cool and launched two other spinoffs.
The show also influenced the crime world and legal system by informing folks on both sides how investigations are carried out.
Helgenberger is leaving the show on her own terms. While the work is rewarding creatively and financially, it’s also a lot of long days.
“Episodic television is an all-consuming kind of job,” she says. “The season is long. It’s like 10 and a half months long, and it’s a minimum of 12-and-a-half-hour days.”
Still, she says she loved the people she worked with and the show, but at this point in her life, “it was time to switch it up.”
Going into season five, she’d negotiated a deal to not work past midnight, which would allow her to have time at home.
“A couple of times I would cave in,” she says. “I’ve been in every godd— can you could imagine in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and in the dark.”
Helgenberger hasn’t had much time to contemplate the future since filming the last episode, because she’s been out promoting the show and taking time off for the holidays. She’s interested in playing a variety of roles, and would like to land something in the stage world, where she could exercise muscles she hasn’t used in a while.
“The experience of being on stage in front of a live audience is something I desire right now,” she says.
She won’t rule out getting on another series, although, like anyone coming off a successful show, finding the next one can be a challenge.
For now, while weighing her next moves, she’s still dealing with the emotions of leaving “CSI.”
It hit home recently when at first the shooting scripts for the show, which always included her name in the No. 2 spot on the cast list, stopped arriving. That was expected, but “I got a little blue,” she says.
But then one came that she opened, only to see another actress in the No. 2 slot.
“I was always No. 2. I’m no longer No. 2,” she says. “Oh, that was odd. It took me back.
“It’s an enormous amount of hard work and dedication, and you get very, very close with this group of people,” she adds. “When you leave, it hits in a very kind of deep way.”
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