How Julianna Margulies Congratulated George Clooney on His Broadway Debut

Julianna Margulies had to congratulate her former ER costar George Clooney on his latest career milestone.

Clooney, 63, is set to make his Broadway debut in the play Good Night, and Good Luck when the play hits the Great White Way in spring 2025. Ahead of the play’s premiere, Margulies, 58, told People that she has given the Oscar winner “a lot of kudos.”

“I just emailed him and said, ‘I’m so proud of you. You don’t have to do this,’” she shared in an interview published on Thursday, October 24. “It’s scary, you know, being on Broadway. And the world we live in now, everyone’s a judge, and you have to block all that out and do your work. And so, I’m really proud of him for picking a hard road. It’s not easy work, and I’m really impressed that he’s doing it.”

Good Night, and Good Luck is based on the 2005 film of the same name. Clooney appeared in the film as Fred Friendly but will take on David Strathairn’s role of journalist Edward R. Murrow in the stage adaptation. The play follows Murrow as he pushes to report U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist efforts. Clooney directed the original film and cowrote the script with Grant Heslov, with whom he has also written the play.

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“I am honored, after all these years, to be coming back to the stage and especially, to Broadway, the art form and the venue that every actor aspires to,” Clooney said in a statement following the play’s announcement in May.

Margulies, for her part, has appeared on Broadway multiple times in shows such as The 24 Hour Plays and Festen. She is currently starring alongside Peter Gallagher in the play Left on Tenth, which is based on writer Delia Ephron’s 2022 memoir of the same name.

Margulies and Clooney famously played love interests Carol Hathaway and Dr. Doug Ross on the medical drama ER. Clooney left the show during its fifth season, while Margulies departed after season 6. The two later returned for one episode in the show’s 15th and final season in 2009.

Last month, Margulies revealed that she and Clooney still refer to each other by their ER characters’ names. “It always had to be Carol and Doug in the end,” she told the Television Academy in honor of the show’s 30th anniversary on September 16. “George and I, to this day, still sign our personal emails to each other ‘Love, Carol’ or ‘Doug.’”

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Margulies, Clooney and other ER cast members got back together for a virtual reunion in April 2021. When asked whether he’d be interested in doing an ER reboot, Clooney stated, “I don’t know. The hardest part is that when you look at the show and consistently over so many years — it would be hard to say that you could do it at the level that we did it. I’m not sure that that’s available.”

At the time, George noted that he had been rewatching the show with his wife, Amal Clooney. “This is better than anything I see in film or anywhere. This is stunning. It’s stunning work,” he said of watching the season 1 episode titled “Love’s Labor Lost.” He added: “I felt that way about a lot of the episodes I watched. I’m not sure [about a reboot] … it’s hard enough to catch lightning again.”

Margulies agreed during the reunion, stating: “You can’t capture lightning in a bottle twice. I think you have to leave what was so beautiful and move on, because it just feels cheap. … It would cheapen it for me.”