As she nears the end of her freshman season starring on the CBS drama “Unforgettable,” and, more immediately, faces another long shooting day as the detective who never forgets a clue, Poppy Montgomery sips her morning latte and does a little remembering.
For instance, she thinks back on her former series, “Without a Trace,” and how hard it was when that series concluded three years ago. For seven seasons she played Samantha Spade, a field agent in a Missing Persons task force, “and when you’ve done one character that long,” she says, “there’s a grieving process, almost, when it ends.”
She had also had a baby, Jackson, with then-partner Adam Kaufman as the show drew to a close, so she opted to take time off from her career.
But after spending Jackson’s first years as a stay-at-home mom, Montgomery got the script for “Unforgettable.”
She was being invited to play Carrie Wells, an NYPD detective whose rare condition renders her incapable of forgetting anything, including crime-solving details that no one else would even notice, let alone remember.
Montgomery, like millions of others, had seen a “60 Minutes” story in Fall 2010 that explored the real-life condition called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory and featured actress Marilu Henner, one of just a handful in the world who have this gift of total recall. (Henner would become a consultant for “Unforgettable,” which airs Tuesday at 10 p.m. EDT.)
MORE
Unforgettable
