Twelve years afterERconcluded its 15-season run on NBC in 2009, the show’s beloved cast — including starsGeorge ClooneyandJulianna Margulies— took a trip down memory lane and relieved their County General Hospital days.
On Thursday, the cast appeared in a live virtual reunion onStars in the Houseto support costarGloria Reuben’s organization,Waterkeeper Alliance. The nonprofit aims to ensure that communities globally have clean water.
During the special Earth Day episode — which streamed exclusively on PEOPLE’s social platforms —Noah Wylerevealed how Clooney, 59, helped to set the tone for the on-set environment.
“George, very early on, remember: you called us all to your trailer and you said, ‘I’ve had the benefit of being on seven series that haven’t bond. Here’s what we’re going to do differently. We’re all going to be nice to everybody and we’re going to erase the line between foreground and background and cast and crew, and we’re all going to take our work seriously, but we’re not going to take ourselves seriously. We’re going to do our homework and we’re not going to waste rehearsal learning our lines,'” said Wyle, who played John Carter.
Stars In The House
“You kind of laid out, you know, the ABCs of professionalism and that just became the standard that we operated under,” he continued. “It should be standard operating procedure, but in a way, it was something that we kept our own counsel and were harsher on each other as castmates than anybody else above us was ever going to be. And we kept each other honest.”
George Clooney and Noah Wyle onER.Sven Arnstein/NBCU
Jokes aside, the Academy Award winner noted that the cast was “really lucky” to have the work environment that they had. Clooney said that “every single actor that came on [the show] was treated with respect” and that executive producer John Wells “made a beautiful set.”
Cast ofER.Sven Arnstein/NBCU
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PEOPLE broke the news of Thursday’s virtual gathering on April 13. At the time, Reuben — who played Jeanie Boulet — shared in a statement how “thrilled” she was to reunite with her former colleagues to support “a cause that is so close to my heart.”
“I’ve been involved with Waterkeeper Alliance for 15 years, representing over 350 community-based Waterkeepers around the globe, and the work that they do is beyond comparison,” the Canadian actress, 56, continued. “We must continue to fight for clean water not just on Earth Day, but all year round!”
Reuben later toldJanine Rubensteinon thePEOPLE Every Daypodcast thatshe “wrote letters” and “sent them out to my fellow castmates"to get them on board. “It’s so beautifully overwhelming because it has been so long since I’ve seen these faces,” she said.
In 2019, Wells suggested that the possibility of the series scoring a reboot isn’t completely out the window.
“We made an awful lot ofERs, 331 episodes,” he toldDeadlinethat year. “That’s a lot of hours, so I can’t imagine that we would, but if somebody came in with a really interesting idea about how to do it, we might.”
Cast ofER.Getty Images
Speaking to PEOPLE for this week’s issue, Margulies — who played Carol Hathaway for six seasons — revealed that her involvement onERwas initially intended to be much smaller.
“I was supposed to die,” the actress, 54, said. “I was just a guest star. I had to drive my cranky little rental car to Crenshaw at this abandoned hospital.”
TheGood Wifealum also said that she considered Clooney, 59, to be her “mentor” on the series. “I followed and watched how he conducted himself on the set. When you create an environment that people feel safe in, then you do your best work. And George taught me that,” she recalled.
“I felt so safe with him,” she said. “I mean, I never thought, ‘Well, why would I be in the bathtub and he’s coming in?’ I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll be in the bathtub. Yeah, great.'”
source: people.com
