Michael Beach Looks Back on "ER"

[JamesG]

When the NBC medical drama approached Beach about making his character, Al Boulet, HIV-positive, “I remember talking to George about it, to Clooney,” Beach says. The main topic of conversation: how the show would handle an AIDS storyline, given that few dramas had tackled the topic by that point in the mid-1990s.

“The thing that ER did, which was unique, was that these characters were living with the problem, you know? They weren’t succumbing to it,” he says. “They were fighting through it and showing that you still had a life, and you still had value. That was the wonderful thing about it.”

He remembers having detailed conversations with the show’s Powers That Be “about how sensitively they were going to deal with it, and to this day, I think that’s one of my favorite storylines,” he says, “just some of the most tender moments I’ve had on camera.”




A lighter, if more nerve-racking, aspect of playing Jeanie’s husband? The potential for being in one of the show’s many lengthy and continuous Steadicam shots… and maybe messing it all up.

“A lot of that crazy, frenetic stuff was not really my storyline,” Beach recalls, but Al occasionally stopped by the hospital, and that was when the pressure was on.

“There was this one time where they go through all of that, and near the end of the scene, I walk in and I have to say a small line, like, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’” Beach says. “You’re just petrified that you’re on your mark, and all this energy, that you don’t ruin the whole take at the very end of the take.”

He says he feels lucky that he was never the reason for a massive start-over, “because after the first couple of times, there’s always grace… But after a couple of times of people messing up, that goodwill and that love? Just goodbye. It’s gone!”

https://tvline.com/lists/michael-bea...tum-leap/er-2/