How ER Kept George Clooney’s Return a Secret 

“You could never pull it off today.”

The “it” Julianna Margulies speaks of are the lengths NBC’s ER went to ensure that (spoiler alert for a 24-year-old episode of TV) the return of George Clooney’s Doug Ross remained top secret as the production geared up to say goodbye to the mother of Doug’s children, Nurse Carol Hathaway (Margulies).

Written and directed by ER showrunner John Wells, season six’s “Such Sweet Sorrow” — which aired May 11, 2000 — centered on Carol’s exodus from Chicago’s Cook County Hospital en route to Seattle, where she would reunite with her on-again, off-again love interest throughout Marguiles’s first six years on the medical drama, pediatrician Doug Ross. Carol arrives at Doug's seaside home, just in time to spot a distant figure step onto a boating dock. As the figure in a flannel shirt slowly strolls down the dock, hands in his pockets, the audience goes from “that's a stand-in, there’s no way they got Clooney" to “NO WAY, they got Clooney!” as Doug — in his typical “aw, shucks,” head down kinda way — casually approaches Carol with an inquiry about their daughters (“They’re with my mom,” Carol replies) before cupping her face for a kiss as the Don Henley ballad “Taking You Home” swells while it pulls on every viewer’s heartstrings.

Along the way, Carol shares a tearful farewell with the charming and earnest Dr. Kovac (Goran Visnjic), a character that ER added in the wake of Clooney’s season-five departure as a potential romantic partner for Carol.

“It always had to be Carol and Doug, in the end,” Margulies tells the Television Academy in an exclusive interview. “George and I, to this day, still sign our personal emails to each other ‘Love, Carol’ or ‘Doug.’”

But for a few anxious moments during and after the episode’s table read, Margulies was uncertain if one of the series’s most emotional reunions was in the cards.

“Every single new episode, we would do a table read of it first in [Wells’] office with the whole cast. And we did the reading, and it didn’t really have a farewell to Carol at all [in the script.]"

With Margulies planning to leave at the end of her contract that year, she understandably expected her character to be given a sendoff worthy of someone who was a load-bearing column of ER’s critical and ratings success for six years. “So, after the table read, I got very emotional,” Margulies recalls. “I quickly got up and ran to the bathroom and just cried. Because I thought, “Oh my God, this character means so much to me. And I know she does to so many fans, and I can't believe they're not giving her a proper sendoff. And Noah [Wyle, who played Dr. John Carter], bless his soul, he saw me and let me cry on his shoulder.”

After being consoled by her costar and accepting what seemed to be Carol’s less-than-satisfying farewell, Wells came to Margulies’s trailer.

“John said: ‘Look, we have the right ending for Carol. But we can't tell anyone. Because if it gets out, it won't be a surprise. So here's what we're going to do.’” Laughing at the memory, she continues, “I was like, ‘I wish he had warned me before I went into that table read!’”

Soon after her chat with Wells, he told Margulies that Clooney had agreed to return and gave her the script that included the reunion scene that viewers would eventually see. “Then, John and I had a meeting,” Margulies explains. “And John said, ‘We’re going to fly the two of you out [to Seattle] separately. A car will pick you up.’” In that meeting, according to Margulies, Wells also told her that, in order to maintain secrecy for the shoot, she would have to sneak her makeup and wardrobe out of her trailer and somehow conceal it inside her backpack.

With a skeleton crew en route to Seattle to make ER history — “I think it was only our DP, our cameraman, John Wells, me and George” — Margulies arrived at the house the production rented and quickly prepared to shoot her character’s final scene as a series regular.

“The owners [of the house] had to sign a nondisclosure [agreement], and I got in their bathroom to do my own makeup and hair. I had taken only the clothes for the character that were left in my trailer, and we shot the scene.”

The subterfuge paid off. No one watching it — not even the cast — knew what was in store until the final moments of “Such Sweet Sorrow.” Neither Margulies nor Clooney were in the United States when the episode aired — she was in Prague shooting the 2001 miniseries The Mists of Avalon — so they couldn’t see the look on their former castmates’ faces at the surprise. But Margulies fondly remembers her first viewing experience.

“I remember I did a lot of phone interviews from my hotel room [in Prague] for the episode, so I finally saw it when I got back [to the U.S.]. And, it really worked. Honestly, every now and then I'll catch it when I'm flipping channels or something. And I still — that music — I still get very emotional. And I remember my mom saying to me — she was so shocked because everyone knew George was off the show — my mother said she screamed, which I think was a lot of people's reaction. It was the right ending for them because Carol and Doug were destined to be together.”

Both Carol and Doug would return in a 2009 episode, “Old Times,” after Wells called and asked the actors to come back for ER’s final season. For Margulies, it was an easy request to grant.

“ER is responsible for our careers. I will always be indebted to ER.”

ER is now streaming on Max and Hulu.