CSI Star Marg’s Shocking Confession

The Sight of Blood Makes Me Faint

By Patricia Nolan
Publisher & date unknown

Marg Helgenberger plays a hardened forensic investigator on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation —but in real life the sight of blood makes her sick— and the thought of handling a corpse totally disgusts her!

“I could never do a job like that,” admits the 42-year-old beauty, who stars as Catherine Willows on the hit CBS crime drama. “Seeing blood makes me want to throw up, and I could never examine dead bodies, even if I was paid tons of money to do it. On TV, I just pretend I’m looking at corpses. I’m just faking it. But to do that for real—no way! I wouldn’t be able to handle it emotionally or physically.”

Ironically, Marg keeps landing ghoulish roles. She starred as an alien-hunting doctor in the two Species movies. And she also played Patsy Ramsey in a TV movie called Perfect Murder, Perfect Town about the death of tiny beauty queen JonBenet. Marg prepared for her CSI role by studying Practical Homicide Investigation, a book overflowing with graphic photos of murdered corpses.

“My producers gave me it so I could understand what my character’s job is all about—and I looked through it, page by gruesome page,” Marg reveals in an exclusive interview. “It was really disgusting. It was filled with pictures of mutilated bodies. It was so gross! I’ve never looked at anything so awful as this book.”

The alluring actress admits that she literally turned as white as a corpse and felt so weak that she had to sit down.

“I got really dizzy,” Marg confides. “I wanted to either throw up or faint! These pictures were the real thing, with all the disgusting details. Newspapers never publish photos like that, nor do they write complex descriptions of murders. They leave out a lot of details, and I can see why. The average person would not be able to handle seeing such gruesome photos or stomach reading all the horrible facts.”

The actress, married to former L.A. Law star Alan Rosenberg and mom to 11-year-old son Hugh, has developed the utmost respect for real crime scene investigators.

“They have a dirty job to do, but someone has to do it,” says Marg. “The closest I ever came to seeing blood on the job was when I was a teenager working as a meat inspector in a factory. That wasn’t nearly as bad. As for pretending to be a forensic investigator every week, well, as long as I never have to see blood for real, I’ll be just fine.”     ♦