‘Suits’ and ‘My Life with the Walter Boys’ Star Sarah Rafferty Is Raising Awareness for Alzheimer’s (Exclusive)
Rafferty partnered with Eli Lilly and Company to encourage adults with memory issues to talk with their doctor
Key Takeaways
- Sarah Rafferty is partnering with Eli Lilly and Company to raise awareness for Alzheimer's.
- The actress learned a lot from portraying Donna Paulsen on 'Suits'.
- Rafferty currently stars on 'My Life with the Walter Boys' as Katherine Walter.
She’s been the unapologetically confident Donna Paulsen on Suits and the warmhearted, resilient Katherine Walter on My Life with the Walter Boys. Now, Sarah Rafferty is taking on a new role: she’s raising awareness for early symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease.
With over 25 years of roles under her belt, Rafferty is an instantly recognizable star, thanks to credits including Law & Order (1999), Walker, Texas Ranger (2001), The Practice (2003) and Charmed (2004). In 2011, Rafferty booked her biggest roles yet with Suits and then My Life with the Walter Boys in 2023.
After watching her grandmother and father receive an Alzheimer’s diagnosis in real life, Rafferty has partnered with Eli Lilly and Company to encourage adults experiencing memory and thinking issues to talk with a doctor. Woman’s World recently spoke with Rafferty about her partnership, as well as her most popular television roles.
WW: You’ve partnered with Eli Lilly to raise awareness about early symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease. Can you share a bit about why you decided to partner with them and why it felt like the right fit for you?
Sarah Rafferty: I’m really excited to partner with Kisunla. I’ve been talking about Alzheimer’s for over a decade because both my grandmother and my father had Alzheimer’s, so this is really, really personal. I’ve been talking a lot about the stigma around Alzheimer’s disease, about raising funds for research and about caregivers. When my grandmother and my father were struggling with the disease, there weren’t really a lot of treatment options available to them—it was a different time. And now times have changed, and there are options. So, I was really excited to partner with Kisunla to talk about the fact that people have options now, especially when they act early.
WW: Can you share a bit about your family’s personal journey with Alzheimer’s Disease?
Sarah Rafferty: My dad and my grandmother are just 20 years apart, and my dad was my grandmother’s primary caregiver. I watched him take care of her and have very few options for her care. Then it was shortly after we lost her that he was diagnosed, so it felt like a double whammy in many ways. When we were talking to his doctors, there weren’t a lot of options for his treatment. It’s been a little over a decade since then and I’m really happy to report that there are options.
We’re also having so many more conversations around brain health in general and preventative therapies, lifestyle choices. It’s not as awkward to talk about your brain health as it was back when my dad was dealing with it. It’s a normal thing to bring up with your doctor. I really want to encourage people to talk to their doctor about their brain health and ask what options might be available to them if they do have memory and thinking issues.
WW: How have your grandmother’s and your father’s diagnoses impacted your own health journey?
Sarah Rafferty: I’ve got to be honest, watching it happen to my grandmother and then my father does scare me a little bit, but that has made me incredibly proactive. There are a lot of things that we can do to take care of our brain health. In terms of exercise, in terms of eating right, but we also need to sleep well and learn new things and keep our brains active and stay involved in our communities. Those are all really important things to do and I think about them every day, and I talk about it every day. I’m also one of four daughters; I have daughters and nieces, and two out of three brains with Alzheimer’s are female brains. So this is a woman’s issue and women are also disproportionately affected by caretaking. So it really is personal on a lot of levels.
WW: Were there any specific signs you noticed in your family members that you didn’t realize were signs of Alzheimer’s that maybe people should take note of?
Sarah Rafferty: A very smart person recently helped me understand that it’s not so much forgetting where you put your keys as it is forgetting what your keys are for. I have lots of memories with my grandmother and my father, and it was very hard the first time I realized that my grandmother didn’t recognize who I was, and she was mistaking me for somebody else. I think an escalation that occurred with my dad was that we were in a very familiar place, and we were taking two separate cars from one location to our home and he got lost, even though he was following us. That was hard. Many times, you sense that your loved one isn’t themselves anymore.
WW: You starred as Donna on Suits. Was there a moment when you knew Donna was going to be much more than just Harvey’s assistant and become a fan favorite?
Sarah Rafferty: I don’t think I was thinking about her in that way. When I was playing her, I was thinking about the superhero version of being the most indispensable assistant in the world who appears to make a ton of money because her dresses are so beautiful and expensive.
No, but I’m so thrilled that Suits got to have a resurgence [on Netflix], and it means so much to be a part of people’s lives. So many people come up to me and say, ‘I watch it with my son, and it’s our shared thing.’ The fact that the show brought people together in that way means so much to me. I’m really happy to be a part of two shows that provide an escape for people. When I think about it in terms of this Alzheimer’s space, which has been a huge part of my life, people need breaks. Caregivers need breaks. If they’re watching Suits to get away for 42 minutes and relax and escape, or with Walter Boys right now, just escaping our crazy world, I feel really honored to be a little part of that.
WW: Donna was incredibly confident and seemed to know everything about everything. What did playing Donna teach you about yourself as a person or an actor or what did you take from the experience?
Sarah Rafferty: I definitely learned how much people appreciate confidence. She really had a lot of confidence. In some ways it was ridiculous and really funny, and in others, she had a clear understanding of her worth and what she brought to a situation. She wasn’t a lawyer, but she brought a different kind of intelligence. She was a people person who had real emotional intelligence and understood what made people tick. If you look at Louis (Rick Hoffman) and you look at Donna, who were best friends, they’re opposites in terms of their emotional intelligence, but they both brought something really important [to the table]. Most of us can relate to Donna because most of us aren’t CEOs, but in our lives, we want to be the best versions of ourselves.
WW: You now star on My Life with the Walter Boys as Katherine Walter. What about this character drew you in?
Sarah Rafferty: It’s not unrelated to what drew me to Donna, which is that they both lead with their heart, and they’re extreme empaths for better or worse. I wanted to play Katherine because she’s a mom and I’m a mom. In some ways, I feel like being able to play some of these moments with these pretend kids is like a love letter to my own kids. I was excited by that. I was also really interested in the fact that she’s adopted and she adopted a lot of children and has a lot of children, and that she’s driven by this sense of wanting everybody to feel like they belong. That was a really beautiful piece of her, like her mothering is also an act of healing for herself.
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