'The Hot Zone' happened because of Ridley Scott: Julianna Margulies

Julianna Margulies says she has so much trust in Ridley Scott that she would not mind reading even a phone book for her longtime collaborator.

The actor, who worked with the Oscar-winning director on her most acclaimed project, "The Good Wife", said starring in "The Hot Zone" was a no brainer as Scott was one of the executive producers on the new show.

"Ridley Scott, who was my boss on 'The Good Wife', was a very big pull for me (for this show). I knew I was in good hands. He's the one who got me to do 'The Good Wife' actually. I would pretty much read the phone book for him," she told PTI in a telephonic interview from New York.

In the six-part limited series from National Geographic, Margulies plays real-life figure Dr Nancy Jaax, a US Army scientist who is appointed to work on the Ebola outbreak operation for their United States Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).

The show is based on Richard Preston's 1994 book of the same name.

The actor said the project was sitting on Scott and producer Lynda Obst's desks for around 30 years and was supposed to be a two-hour film.

Margulies said the fact that the movie didn't happen was a "silver lining" as she believes a 120-minute-long project would have hardly done justice to the story of "The Hot Zone".

"... We got to tell it in six hours, which is I think the most important part of the story, is that you can't really tell this much of a complicated story in two hours. You needed the six hours. So I think in the end it was a real blessing in disguise that they weren't able to make it when they wanted to make it originally."
"I learned a lot from him, because he was in Sierra Leone in 2015 when there was an Ebola Zaire outbreak and 11,000 people died. So that was an incredible education for me, because I knew nothing about Ebola or the science behind finding a vaccine and a cure, or the story of it."