Marcia Gay Harden Looks Back At SVU, The Newsroom, Code Black And More

First TV roles can leave an indelible mark on a young actor, imprinting themselves in detail and serving as a seminal reminder of how far one has come in one's career.

And then there's 1990's Kojak: None So Blind, a TV movie that Marcia Gay Harden... kinda recalls?

"I was playing a character, a young girl," she tells TVLine, laughing. "I remember climbing a step — that's all I remember — in a short skirt on Kojak and thinking, 'God, I hope they can't see my panties.'"

Since then, the in-demand actress has appeared in more than 30 TV movies and series, not to mention several feature films. She's played a conflicted Chicago Hope patient and a couple of notable legal eagles. She's been an aloof-and-fabulous Trophy Wife predecessor, a take-no-bull Code Black doctor and one very surprising SVU FBI agent.

Harden's latest series, the historical drama Barkskins, airs Mondays at 9/8c on Nat Geo. In it, she plays a tough, pioneer widow named Mathilde who's changing societal norms in the perilous wilds of New France. Scroll down to hear the Oscar-winning actress reminisce about some of her more memorable television stints, starting with the time she was asked to channel "the most beautiful woman in the world."

Harden had played a "white trash, Texas trailer"-type character in a 1991 TV movie In Broad Daylight, so she was shocked when director James Steven Sadwith wanted her to play Ava Gardner in CBS' Frank Sinatra biopic miniseries. "I said, 'Dude, Ava Gardner is considered the most beautiful woman in the world. You cast me as this trashy person.' He said, 'No, I think you can.'" So she did. "I didn't think of myself as beautiful, but to be in her gowns... and you know, beauty is a lot about attitude." She remembers the scene above, "where they had this mink that slipped down [Ava's] shoulders... and I was just like, the sexiest thing ever!" Harden laughs. "I kept a little bit of that Ava, I hope, in my life with me."

In a Season 1 episode of the medical drama, Harden played a friend of nurse Camille's who wanted an abortion in order for her husband, who suffered from Parkinson's Disease, to have a fetal tissue transplant. "It was a really emotional character," she says, recalling that while on set she put into use some advice from her Miller's Crossing co-star Albert Finney. "When I would see actors preparing... like heavy breathing before their big crying scene or pounding their chest or something, it just seemed really embarrassing to me... but then Albert said, 'Darling, you have to be private in public.'" Still, she worried. "Because sometimes you think, 'The crew is going to think I'm dorky.' But at the end of the day, there's no subtitles about what the crew thinks. You just have to do your job."

Harden was on the set of the CBS drama, which filmed in Brooklyn, NY, on Sept. 11, 2001. "I'd never seen a studio shut down for anything," she says. "And then, we had to get home." When the city started closing bridges and tunnels, Harden worried that she wouldn't be able to get home to Manhattan, where she and her family lived. "So I borrowed a prop bike." She rode the loaner bike to the Brooklyn Bridge, somehow made it on to the congested pedestrian pathway and eventually got back to her place. She later bought the bike, "just to have it with me. I still have it. It felt like a memory that I should have forever. It felt like my stallion that got me home, kind of."

Claire Maddox, the tenacious antagonist to Glenn Close's Patty Hewes on the FX legal thriller, "was very, very sexy. She had a little cleavage. She wore suits, but they were fitted to within an inch of her life, and it was all about legs all the time," Harden says, giving the show's costume department a lot of credit for her character's femme fatale feel. "She was smart as a whip, and she also was a very sexual woman who liked showing it."

When Harden made her first appearance on the police procedural, she was upright, undercover FBI agent Dana Lewis. By the time she made her fourth appearance eight years later, she was unhinged murderer Dana Lewis. "And to this day, let me tell you, part of me regrets doing [the last time]," she says of the left turn her character took at the end, chuckling. "I'd never thought that she was dishonest. In fact, she's one of the most noble people I've ever played... So I'm always waiting for them to bump [her] out of jail and go, 'Oh, just joking! Dana couldn't do that! It seems she was undercover in jail. That's probably why she's been there all this time, busting the most heavy crime mob, etc." When we point out that even Chris Meloni's Elliot Stabler is returning to the SVU-verse after a long absence, Harden laughs. "Maybe that's the angle," she says. "If Meloni can come back, then Dana can, too."

"Oh, it was devastating that it ended. That show had legs!" Harden says of the short-lived ABC comedy about a man navigating life with his third (young) wife and two exes. "I have never laughed so hard in my life as being with Brad Whitford," who played Pete; Harden was his aloof first wife, Diane, while Michaela Watkins was his flaky second wife, Jackie. Malin Ackerman had the title role. "We all really, really enjoyed being with each other," Harden recalls. "There was not a problem on that set. It was fantastic, and it was just a big, fat bummer that it ended."

Harden entered the Aaron Sorkin drama in Season 2 as Rebecca Halliday, a no-nonsense lawyer for the cable network that employed Jeff Daniels' Will McAvoy. "Aaron wrote this incredible beginning for this character, and I remember Jeff saying, 'You want to know the secret to Aaron? Be off-book" — aka have your lines completely memorized — "for rehearsal.' So I go into first rehearsal. I was off book. And I just remember Aaron looking over at Jeff and nodding, like, 'We'll keep her.'"

Harden recurred in Season 1 of the ABC drama but hasn't appeared since... not that that stopped the show from having her character play a pivotal part in the just-wrapped final season. "I wasn't keeping up with the show, even though I adore Viola [Davis]," she says. "When they asked me to come back for the last episode, I was working, I think, and I couldn't. All I know is Viola walked up to me at a party, one of the Emmy parties. She just beautifully sauntered, and she said, 'We shoot you in the face.'"

The CBS medical drama Harden led for three seasons never was a lock for renewal, and she's still not sure why. "The fact that it was on the bubble felt so strange to me, because the people who loved the show really loved the show, and I felt like the numbers were good," she says. "I felt like it was smart. I thought the cast was lovely... But at some point, you learn I can only control that which I'm actually in control of. Whether a show gets picked up or not is completely outside of our control."

As reporter Maggie Brener, "I was only supposed to be in three episodes" of the Apple TV+ drama, Harden says, "and then they kept expanding her part and her role in the story." "She's such a smartass, smart-cracking whippersnapper — whatever you want to call it — and I love her." She also loved being on set "with all those amazing women" including Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston and showrunner Kerry Ehrin "calling the shots." Whether Harden will be back, for now, is up in the air: "I hope I'm in Season 2."

AMLT's Gary could never figure out why his mother took off when he was a kid... and Harden — who played that mom in a Season 2 guest spot — says she understands his confusion. "The cast is really wonderful and warm and welcoming," she says, but "I'm not sure I completely understand the mother." Harden took the part after EP David Marshall Grant, with whom she worked on Code Black "had called me to go to try to play her and to bring some gravity to her," she says. So that was the journey: to figure out how to, in this very small moment of presenting her, how to present someone that had been so callous to leave her son and have no communication."

Harden currently stars in Nat Geo's Barkskins, a miniseries based on an Annie Proulx novel about French and English colonists in the area of Canada known in the 1600s and 1700s as New France. Though much of the drama focuses on women who came from France "to find a guy and basically pumped out babies just because King Louis said he would give them a little dowry," Harden explains, her character, Mathilde, is a little older and a land-owning widow (shocking for the time) who's "one of the new age, one of the new women of the new world... She's thwarting tradition." She chuckles. "She's like the mother of modern women."