"It's like ER times 10."

That's how actress Aimee Garcia described her new show Trauma to us when we caught up to her recently. The medical drama, which airs Mondays at 9PM as part of NBC's revamped line-up, "pushes the envelope on all levels. It's like ER, but instead of opening someone's throat in an operating room, you're opening someone's throat in a moving helicopter."

Garcia, who plays pilot Marisa Benez, dished about riding along on actual 911 calls, hanging from a crane and feedback from real-life EMTs.




For those who haven't had a chance to watch Trauma yet, what can you tell us about the show?

Trauma is about a group of San Francisco paramedics and EMTs who answer the 911 call. So if you get in a car accident or start having chest pains, this is the team that you call.

And it's about what it means to be a paramedic where you're dealing with death on a daily basis ... Sometimes they save people and sometimes they don't, but the show is about where they release all of that stress and how that interferes or affects their personal life and creates trauma for them personally as well as professionally.




And how does your character fit into it?

I'm a helicopter pilot and get patients from point A to point B as quickly as possible. If someone gets hurt while mountain biking on a cliffside or on a ship or in a place where ambulances can't get to quickly, they call a helicopter ...

I'm a medevac pilot who has my EMT certificate and an Iraqi war veteran, and I'm used to being shot at as I'm flying Blackhawks. So she's a good person to have on your side if you need to get to the hospital quickly.




How did you prepare for the role?

I went on numerous ride-alongs in ambulances during the day and at night with San Francisco paramedics as they picked up various patients around the city, and learned that these people really are unsung heroes. They're very calm and collected even when the sirens are blaring because they have to be ...

I spent a lot of time in helicopters learning the basics of flying; I wanted to feel as comfortable as possible in the chopper. [And] I interviewed like 12 pilots, half of whom had actually flown in combat.

I'll never forget interviewing a female medevac pilot who had been to Iraq, who said, "You know, when you are transporting injured Navy Seals, your voice is very important because you are commander-in-chief of that helicopter and if they hear fear in their voice, it's going to really affect them."




It sounds like you really enjoy doing the research.

I do ... I've never flown a helicopter, I've never been shot at and I've never been to war. When [Marisa] speaks, you have to believe that she's been in the mud, that's she's been in the thick of it, that she's seen her friends' heads blown off, that she's seen nasty, nasty stuff that most of us will never see in a lifetime.

And that's a big, big responsibility. It's one thing to portray a college student and another thing to play a bratty millionaire like I played on the George Lopez Show.




What do you think separates Trauma from other medical dramas?

Trauma is the only medical drama that takes place out in the field; our backdrop isn't the operating room but the Golden Gate Bridge and the Embarcadero and Marin County. So I think that alone sets it apart from other medical dramas because you can't build a Bay Bridge on the Universal lot.

I think you can tell if it's computer generated ... I'm not sitting in a chair in front of a green screen, I'm sitting in an actual chopper. I mean just two days ago I was hanging from a crane inside a helicopter four stories high over concrete and I thought, well, if I fall, I'm dead [laughs]. So, you know, it's a very physical show. I have bruises the size of softballs all over my legs and it really feels more like a film instead of TV.




What's the dynamic of the cast like?

A lot of my co-stars have never done TV before. Like Cliff Curtis, you know, is used to doing films like Blow with Johnny Depp and Training Day with Ethan Hawke and Bringing Out the Dead with [Martin] Scorcese.

And Derek Luke is also a film star in his own right with all the Tyler Perry films and Antwone Fisher, so they've never, ever, ever done TV before.

And Anastasia Griffith is used to doing shows on FX like Damages. I think that also sets us apart, [it's like] we're shooting a great indie with great character actors who come from quality, quality features and quality cable shows.




Have you gotten any kind of feedback yet from paramedics?

Yeah. EMTs are a very passionate community and they want us to portray them as accurately as possible. So we've actually been incorporating their suggestions into storylines.

For example, it's not every day that you deal with an MCI, which means a multiple casualty incident, like you see in the pilot with a tanker explosion and multiple-car pileups.

Most of the time you're dealing with false alarms, or a homeless person who wants free drugs so they fake a cardiac arrest, or a grandmother who fell off her chair, or someone who is watching a scary movie and ends up giving themselves a panic attack.

So we've really encouraged the EMT community to give us their opinions and we're actually rewriting episodes and adding scenes to include those kinds of less dramatic but more accurate calls.

http://insidetv.aol.com/2009/10/12/aimee-garcia-deals-with-trauma/