Tapping into the feelings of grieving a loved one has been, unfortunately, “quite easy” for Mika Amonsen on Boston Blue, the actor tells TV Insider. Whenever a scene from the first season of the Blue Bloods spinoff featured talks of Linda Reagan (Amy Carlson), Sean Reagan’s late mother, Amonsen says he only needed to tap into his love for his grandmother to get ready for the scene.
His grandmother died not long before Boston Blue filming began. He shares that, like Linda and St. Patrick’s Day, his grandma really loved Christmas, so those memories helped him understand Sean’s feelings of missing his mother, especially for Boston Blue Season 1 Episode 12, which aired on March 13. For all the other Linda context he needed, Amonsen turned to his costar, Donnie Wahlberg, and his own personal history of watching Blue Bloods.
Boston Blue Season 1 Episode 12 was a St. Patrick’s Day-themed installment that brought up happy and sad memories for Danny and Sean. They loved reminiscing on happy memories of Linda’s love of the holiday, but the celebrations of their Irish heritage coincided with the troublesome return of the gang responsible for Linda’s death (the character died in Season 8 Episode 1 of Blue Bloods). The cartel was staging a vengeful attack in Boston during the St. Patrick’s Day parade, but Danny and Lena (Sonequa Martin-Green) were able to thwart it. It was a tough day for the father-son duo, made easier by some kindness from the Silvers at the end of the episode.
Amonsen took over the role of Sean Reagan from Andrew Terraciano, who grew up playing the character on Blue Bloods. It wasn’t hard for Amonsen to familiarize himself with Linda’s story during filming, because he was a fan of Blue Bloods before he joined the onscreen family. And Episode 12 of Boston Blue, of course, wasn’t the first time Sean’s mom has come up on the spinoff.
“We’d explored Linda and other episodes, and I’ve spoken to Donnie at length about it. I watched the show growing up with my dad, so I was familiar with that loss for Sean and Danny as well,” Amonsen tells us.
For this episode, Amonsen says, “It was really easy to tap into loss of a loved one on a holiday.”
Christos Kalohoridis / CBS
“I just lost my grandmother, we were very close, at the beginning of shooting,” he shares. “It was something that was very easy for me to tap into. And I think for most people, when you lose a family member, those holidays, they just feel different, especially when there was a special holiday that somebody particularly enjoyed. Hers was Christmas, for example.”
Wahlberg was “a wealth of knowledge” in the Linda Reagan department, he adds, “so it’s a great benefit working alongside him.”
“Watching Linda for as long as I did, you feel connected to that character already,” Amonsen continues. “So it was really just easy to be like, OK, that happened in that part of my life already. In terms of what I spoke about with Donnie, he just reinforced it. In every scene, we would talk about what the loss was like with her exit and how Sean was after those moments.”
Amonsen and Wahlberg would share their perspectives on the loss of Linda from the differing points of view between a father and son.
“They just felt different from him, his standpoint as a father with Sean,” Amonsen explains. “[Danny] not being there as much as he wanted to be on top of that loss was difficult for Sean. And then navigating that relationship while searching for the guy that killed Jonah’s [Marcus Scribner] father, those were the kinds of conversations we had.”
Amonsen says that the Silver family was the perfect group to help Danny and Sean through this tough day.
“They’re more informed than most, being a cop family, with that kind of loss,” he says, but it’s more so “the fact that they’re super loving and kind.”
The St. Patrick’s Day parade, paired with the investigation during it, made Sean really miss home, according to Amonsen.
“It brings up those family dinners that we’ve seen on the show so many times. Those St. Patrick’s Day dinners,” he says. “By the end of it, you see Lena and Jonah go out of their way to recreate that for them. So for Sean, that’s what that means. You see that longing and sadness throughout the episode, touching on those points of what made the holiday so special to him and his family and his mom, and then losing hope towards the end and having Jonah lift his spirits. You really get to see that all tie in together.”
This dinner cements the fact that the Reagans and Silvers are becoming a family, according to Amonsen.
“It puts a great bow on the end of the episode. It makes both Danny and Sean feel at home,” he explains. “They’re both going through all that pain throughout the episode, being reminiscent of Linda, and then they get to come home and have a group that really understands them. It ties together that this is our new family dynamic. This is our place where we can come to.”
On a lighter note, the episode revealed that Jamie (Will Estes) and Eddie (Vanessa Ray) from Blue Bloods had a baby boy, and they named him Joe Francis Reagan, after the eldest, late Reagan sibling, Joe, and patriarch Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck).