Julianna Margulies alleges ‘frightening’ hotel room encounter with Steven Seagal

The Good Wife star claimed incident occurred when she was 23 and auditioning for one of Seagal’s action films

Julianna Margulies has alleged that she experienced a “frightening” hotel room encounter with Steven Seagal in the early days of her career.

Margulies, who is best known for her roles in ER and The Good Wife, describes the alleged experience in her new memoir, Sunshine Girl, and addressed it while appearing on The Drew Barrymore Show.

Margulies told Barrymore that she met Seagal in the early Nineties while auditioning for a role in his 1991 film Out for Justice, and was told by the film’s casting director to meet Seagal in his hotel room.

Despite being told that the casting director would be in the room with her and Seagal, Margulies said she arrived to discover the casting director was absent.

When she arrived, she discovered that it was just Seagal in the room, and the pair began discussing a scene in the film.

“It was a frightening moment,” Margulies said. “He asked me to sit on this couch and underneath this cushion... I jumped up, there was something hard [beneath the cushion], and he pulled out a gun. And he said, ‘Oh, I must have left my gun there.’”

Margulies said she became terrified.

“I’m 23, and I realise that I’m in an action star’s hotel room with a gun... I had never seen a gun before and he’s six-feet-four and no one knows where I am.”

The actor then claimed that Seagal invited her into the bedroom. Inside, he asked if he could read her palm.

“He put the gun down so I was calming down a little bit and he read my palm and told me that he was a healer and told me I had weak kidneys,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Is this the shtick that works on women?’

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“Anyway, he read the next palm and got in there and started giving me more advice about my body and how I could fix it through his healing. The tough New Yorker in me just inwardly was laughing because it was so awful and hilarious that I just sort of stood up and went, ‘Well, that was fun, thanks about the kidneys, gotta go’, and I just ran for the door waving.”

Margulies previously alleged the Seagal encounter in 2017.

The Independent has reached out to Seagal’s representative for comment.