“Everything Changes”: Ramón Rodríguez Breaks Down Will Trent’s Explosive Season 3 Ending

Will Trent’s world may never be quite the same again. Over the course of three seasons of the hit ABC crime drama, the uptight titular protagonist (played by star and executive producer Ramón Rodríguez), whose dyslexia and abusive childhood in the foster care system has transformed him into one of the most compelling detectives on TV, has gradually opened himself up to his team at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Atlanta Police Department.

Those colleagues — namely his partner Faith Mitchell (Iantha Richardson), his primary mother figure Amanda Wagner (Sonja Sohn), and his on-again, off-again girlfriend Angie Polaski (Erika Christensen) — have, in turn, helped him see that what makes him different is a strength rather than a weakness.

“Will has often struggled with his shame for a lot of things — his abuse, what he’s been through, his dyslexia. One of the things that we talked about when we started Season 3 was, how do we show that there’s been some evolution?” Rodriguez told TV Guide.

“We introduced this character, Eduardo, on his phone, which is great in a couple of ways. It shows that he’s somebody that’s not ashamed of [being dyslexic], which he’d been trying to hide for so long, and he’s finding a way to adapt and live with it and embrace it in a way. What’s cool is he has it in Spanish, which is awesome because it’s a direct connection to his family roots. We him slowly begin to make that connection in Season 2, when he learns where his [biological] mother is from, he goes to Puerto Rico and he starts learning Spanish.”

But in Tuesday’s Season 3 finale, which centers around a bioweapons attack on the city of Atlanta, Will comes face-to-face with the reality that his found family might be torn apart — all while grappling with the revelation in the penultimate episode that Sheriff Caleb Broussard (Yul Vazquez) was his biological father.

In the end, Will and the rest of his team are able to stop a domestic group known as the Founder’s Front from spreading a deadly bacteria that targets the central nervous system across the city — but not all of them emerge from the rubble unscathed. Despite Angie’s best efforts to kill the terrorists who were holding Amanda hostage in her own office at the GBI, one of the gunmen shoots Amanda in the chest, leaving her in critical condition. (In the other major cliffhanger of the hour, Jake McLaughlin’s Michael Ormewood, who was recently diagnosed with a brain tumor, collapsed unexpectedly and seemingly experienced a seizure at the home he shares with Faith.)

Below, Rodríguez breaks down the extreme isolation that Will feels after learning that Amanda may not wake up from her coma and that Angie is pregnant with another man’s (Scott Foley) baby, the decision to bring a brand new character (who was not in executive producer Karin Slaughter’s novels) into the fold as Will’s father — and what he made of Will’s surreal “Last Dance” dream sequence earlier this season.

Your showrunners, Liz Heldens and Daniel Thomsen, have noted that the first two season finales felt really intimate, and they wanted to create a two-part finale event. What kinds of conversations did you have about how you wanted to end this third season?

Ramón Rodríguez: We do these two-part stories in cases that tend to involve our whole cast. What’s fun about [this one] is it does involve some personal and identity issues for Will as he discovers this sheriff is his dad. He ends up discovering more about what Angie and Seth have going on. That’s complicated. Meanwhile, the city of Atlanta’s under siege by this domestic terrorist group, so it feels much bigger and it was a way to give it that [feeling] like, “OK, this is really bad, and the stakes are just really high in this situation.” But what I thought was really great is at the end of that finale, we bring it back to what really resonates for folks, [which] are these characters. We get to see those final three scenes between Will and Angie in the hospital, followed by [Ormewood] and Faith in their place, and then followed by Will and Amanda.

What I’m really excited about is the open, loose storylines that we left about what could potentially happen for a Season 4. This is the most episodes we’ve ever done on this show. We’d never done 18 episodes, and it’s a marathon. Trying to find ways to keep it elevated on every level, from the scripts to production when we’re filming, is a real challenge, but I’m proud that everyone really brought their A-game and stepped up, especially for those last two episodes.

We got to bring in Yul Vazquez as my father. We got to bring in Kevin Dunn who I’ve not worked with since Transformers, which was incredible. He played Shia [LaBeouf]’s dad in Transformers and I hadn’t seen him since then, so it was great when we brought him into that. I’ve never been part of a show that’s gone on for more than one season, at least from its inception, and what’s been great is being able to bring in friends and people that you like working with. So bringing in Gina Rodriguez this season [as DA Marion Alba, Will’s love interest], who’s a friend of mine, was really fantastic. It just fills the whole world up.

At the end of the finale, Will is begging Amanda to wake up after she barely survived her surgery. He is also able to tell her how much she means to him as his kind of surrogate mother — something he probably would not have been able to say if she was conscious and awake. What were you trying to convey in Will’s final monologue? What kinds of emotions were you trying to tap into?

Rodríguez: I think Will finds himself alone. It’s kind of similar to the end of Season 2. He sees Angie beginning a family, which is all that Will has ever wanted — it’s all he’s longed for. We explored that whole thing with the table of him and Angie and potentially starting a family, and the symbolic nature of what that table represented. And now, here he is in the hospital hearing the news that Amanda’s been shot and that Angie’s pregnant [with] Seth’s baby. But then, we also see him just be there for her as a friend despite the pain and agony and what that must cause him inside. I think that’s a real character trait that he does carry, and I love that they write that for him — those moments where he does show up.

But at the end, I think he’s realizing all he has is Amanda in that particular moment. Of course there’s [Will’s dog] Betty, but you’re right — he wouldn’t be able to speak and express and articulate those feelings because of their dynamic. It’s a tough love that they have; they don’t talk about the things that they should unpack. They’re reserved and hide their emotions pretty deeply, but I think in that moment he’s quite desperate. So that was one of the feelings that we were playing with — this desperation of someone who has run out of any options of what you could consider family and is here looking at the last person that resembles family, so it’s pretty dire.

What is going through Will’s mind as Angie tells him about her pregnancy and then the two of them see the baby’s heartbeat for the first time together?

Rodríguez: Oh man, what a moment. I think hearing that news is quite the bomb. I don’t believe Will saw that coming, despite seeing that Angie and Seth had something [going on]. But I think it all became very real once he’s in the doctor’s office, and they hear that heartbeat. I think they both realize how awkward and difficult it is. And at least for Will, he’s just floored and shocked that this is now a reality. It’s all he ever wanted [with Angie], but yet he’s not running away — and I think that says a lot. There’s traits about this character that I really adore — his heart, his loyalty — even when it hurts him so much.

And when Seth walks in, [Will] takes Betty, he walks out of the room, he takes that one look back, and it’s absolutely, devastatingly heartbreaking. But I think he also understands she’s in love; she has this relationship that’s going well. I just think it’s not what he ever thought or imagined. And even though they were not together, I think there might always be an inkling of hope that maybe there’s something that could happen [between them].

Rodríguez: We have a great partnership, and it’s a really incredible experience when you get to work with such collaborative creators. Me, Liz, and Dan talk throughout the entire season about every character, about everything that has to do with the show. So when we were discussing some things that we can introduce and the things that hopefully have long-lasting effects for our characters, which are the things that are probably most compelling, I’ve always been in the back of my mind wondering, “Who’s Will’s dad?” We’ve never really explored and discussed that. We’ve left it alone, like you said, since the James Ulster conversation. So when I threw that pebble into the creative pond, Liz and Dan really responded and thought, “That’s something interesting worth exploring. Let’s uncover that rock and see what unfolds.”

We were pivoting away [and saying] that it’s not James Ulster; here’s this man, sheriff Caleb. We had a fun conversation about casting because we didn’t think he had to be someone Latino at all. We had an open palette, and his name came up. I actually had another project that I had been considering him for, and I think he’s just a fantastic actor. And especially when the characters are dressed up, there’s a similarity and you can believe that that man is his father. We had a lot of fun integrating some character traits [between them], like when they’re talking about [fixing] the wall in Will’s house and Will tells Amanda that it’s a five-step process, and then we hear Caleb say [the same thing]. I love that you can see where you come from, but it’s really trippy. I thought that was a cool little anecdote.

So we think this is something that could potentially be ongoing and really interesting to keep exploring. We still don’t know much about Caleb and who he is, so I think that’s an interesting thing to explore in Season 4.

My favorite scene between Will and Caleb in the finale was when they were trying to have a really earnest conversation while trying to stop domestic terrorists from aerosolizing the bacteria. I loved that Caleb chose that moment to invite Will to his house for dinner and to meet the rest of his family. This show has always done a great job of injecting comedy into really dramatic situations, but has the emphasis on leaning into the quirkier parts of the show been more intentional this season?