'Millers in Marriage' star Julianna Margulies reveals an actor ex talked down to her because of TV career

Yahoo

23-02-2025

For writer, director and actor Edward Burns, his film Millers in Marriage (now in theatres and on digital) was an opportunity to craft a story that would allow adults in their 50s to watch a movie that reflected their lives. Starring Burns himself, along with Julianna Margulies, Gretchen Mol, Minnie Drive, Benjamin Bratt, Patrick Wilson, Morena Baccarin, Brian d'Arcy James and Campbell Scott, the film is about three couples exploring who they are as they approach 60. How they've changed as individuals, and as partners, from their younger years.
Maggie (Margulies), Eve (Mol) and Andy Miller (Burns) are siblings, who didn't grow up in the most stable household. Each sibling is going through their own issues in their marriages, trying to navigate their personal aspirations and desires within their relationships.
Maggie is a writer, just like her husband Nick (Scott). While Nick was the more successful writer initially, the dynamic has changed with Maggie continuing to succeed, while Nick struggles to find creative inspiration.
Eve was a musician, but put her passion aside when she became her mom, while her husband Scott (Wilson), an alcoholic, continues to manage musicians, frequently not keeping in contact with his wife when he's travelling.
Andy is separated from his wife, Tina (Baccarin), and has started a new relationship with Renee (Driver), but he isn't ready to cut ties with his ex.
Maggie and Nick's dynamic in Millers in Marriage is particularly interesting. There's this shift where he was the more celebrated novelist who succeeded first, but now he's not writing and Maggie is still succeeding. But she's also still craving his approval, which he's not providing as her success is threatening to him, and he doesn't see her work as being inferior to his.
For Margulies, playing this dynamic was something she could relate to.
"I once dated a guy when I was on ER who was a New York theatre actor and he would say, 'Yeah, but you do TV.' And he was always talking me down because I was on television," Margulies told Yahoo Canada. "So I understand that dynamic very well, and I would feel less than, and for some reason, probably because I was in my 20s, I allowed myself to feel less than. I thought it was OK."
"Now, as a woman in her 50s, I'd tell him to go screw himself. But when you start a relationship where the dynamic is already set in, and then you grow, you get older together until you're in your 50s and the dynamic shifts in the course of those years, where your work now is taking precedent over his work, and paying the mortgage, and buying all of life's beautiful things that they enjoy, yet you're still the lower one. 'You write schlock. You write silly novels. I write meaningful things.'"
As Margulies also highlighted, while we get the sense that Maggie believes Nick is the better writer, she's "thrilled" about her success because she "lives vicariously through her characters." Using her writing as "her way of escaping.
"I think now, with the kids gone, they have to confront the fact that this can't keep going on in the same dynamic. It's not going to happen," Margulies said.
"I think she really does support him and I think ultimately, Maggie really does believe that he is the better writer, honestly. But ... it's like, seeing him wallow in his self-pity is a turn off, and that's the beginning of the end of that marriage, because he can't get out of it."
In a particularly telling scene in Millers in Marriage, the first scene we see both Eve and Maggie together is an interesting look at the relationship between these sisters, and how they're marriages are different, but the tensions have similarities.
Maggie is telling Eve about how she wants Nick to just get out of the house, while Eve is the opposite, wishing her husband would just be home with her sometimes.
"Do you ever fantasize about getting a divorce?" Maggie says.
"It's clever storytelling, because you immediately see where these characters are in their lives," Margulies said.
"I don't have a husband underfoot, but I could understand her anxiety of having him home all the time. But it was more about his inability to work. ... She's finally an empty nester and now she has to take care of his feelings. That's how I saw it. ... It's a great scene to say, you always want what you don't have, right?"
"Your perception of somebody else's life is kind of how you can understand your own life," Mol added.
"I think for the character to say, 'Oh, really, you want him gone? That is so foreign to me, because I never know where my husband is.' ... She's on her own so much, but not doing the thing that she loves. ... So I think she's looking at her sister with this kind of curiosity. ... I think with siblings, sometimes, ... we came from the same household, but our instincts in life are entirely different."