Looking back, what do you recall about landing the plum part of Sara Sidle? I remember it fairly well actually. I had been working on The West Wing at the time. I kept getting phone calls from friends asking, “Hey, have you heard of this show? They are adding this character at the last minute. You should check it out.” I was really happy at The West Wing. I didn't pursue it at all. I was like, “No thank you, but thanks for thinking of me.” Then finally, a script came from my agency and it was the show my friends had been calling me about. Probably five pages in, I fell into a trance, knew I had to go meet everybody, and that if I was lucky enough that they were going to cast me, I was going to have to take the job. It was this magnetic pull and I couldn’t stop it anymore. There was a little byline for the character, Sara Sidle, and it said she was from San Francisco, was just coming in to help on an internal case in Las Vegas, that she was going to be a love interest for Grissom, was really tough, had poor social skills, and could drink anyone under the table. It has been pretty consistently like that for seven years so they were right on. I went in, met everybody for the first time—I had been run over accidentally on The West Wing a month or two before so I was limping around. I thought there was no way they were going to hire this actress with these crutches. They brought me back and who knew? I ended up getting it so I was thrilled. [. . .] Originally, Sara was supposed to be a love interest for Grissom but they only seemed to commit to that recently. Did all that speculation and dancing around ever get frustrating? No, not at all. That is one of the cool things about getting to do something over a long period of time. When they decided to bring it back, I had almost decided the audience was sick of the idea of Sara and Grissom. There had been this weird dance that had played out over a couple of seasons that had really led nowhere it seemed. For Billy [Petersen] and I as actors, coming into season one, because it was on the page, we started the show playing it. It was the producers’ decision to pull back on it. There is some truth to the idea that when they realized the show might be on the air for a while, they didn’t want to play all their cards in the first couple of seasons. For me there is a wonderful feeling that viewers still want to know more about those characters. Things finally heated up in the sixth season finale when Sara strolled out in a bathrobe . . . That was interesting because there was a different ending planned for the show, a cliffhanger, and we had already started shooting the episode. I got a phone call in the afternoon from Carol Mendelsohn and Ann Donahue together and they were like, “What do you think about this?” That’s another great thing about working on CSI—the writers will actually call you up and ask you what you think about a storyline. They were definitely giving me the option to say I didn’t want to do it. So I was completely surprised and quickly said, “Yeah!” It was very last minute and I thought it was an amazing Grissom scene. We rarely hear his innermost feelings. The show is so dark and the characters are so driven, they all seem slightly alienated and lonely by nature of what they do. To know there is this little light burning somewhere in their lives was amazing payback and what Sara and Grissom really deserve.
– “Girl, Interrupted: An interview with Jorja Fox,” in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: The Insider’s Guide to the TV Phenomenon (2010).
