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As played by Mamie Gummer, there’s plenty to embrace about the former high school geek who graduated medical school and is now beginning a surgical internship at Denver Memorial Hospital in “Emily Owens, M.D.”
“She’s complicated, screwy, funny, delightful and sweet,” says Gummer, the daughter of Oscar-winning actress Meryl Streep and sculptor Don Gummer, before adding that there are some qualities she doesn’t share with Emily. “I have to check my East Coast/New York attitude, and everything that goes with it, at the door,” she says. “Emily is genuinely optimistic and hopeful, which is quite foreign to me. I’m a realist and exist a couple octaves below her.” A veteran of movies (“Taking Woodstock,” “The Hoax”) and the New York stage, Gummer could be seen by TV viewers on “The Good Wife,” “The Big C” and the miniseries “John Adams.” The CW series is her first smallscreen turn as a title character, leading to some long days on the set. “It’s me and the crew most days, from sunup to sundown,” she says. As the season develops after the romantic drama’s Oct. 16 premiere, Gummer says plots will start to splinter and scripts will more fully develop storylines involving some of the other characters, all of them still working and living in Emily’s world. “It’s a lot, but it’s great. It’s laying cement,” she says. “I’m a pretty fortunate girl.”
