After months of secrecy, including late-night virtual meetings aboard Hallmark’s first-ever Christmas Cruise in November 2024, Ashley Williams is about to make her network TV directorial debut on ABC’s “The Rookie.” Her episode, “A Deadly Secret,” premieres on April 22, 2025.
It’s a huge feat for the beloved Hallmark actress, who has spent over eight years pounding the pavement as an up-and-coming director, even founding Hallmark’s “Make Her Mark” program to recruit and mentor more female directors at the cable network.
After earning a coveted spot in Disney Entertainment Television’s 2024-2025 Directing Program, Williams spent months quietly working behind the scenes to prepare for her directorial debut on “The Rookie” while continuing to appear in, produce, and write Hallmark projects, from “Small Town Setup” to her upcoming movies with Alison Sweeney.
With her episode of “The Rookie” about to premiere, Williams told EntertainmentNOW how time-intensive and joyful the experience was — leading her to hope for more chances to direct future episodes.
“The Rookie,” a popular police drama renewed by ABC in early April for an eighth season, stars Nathan Fillion as John Nolan, once the oldest rookie in the LAPD, who’s become a wise mentor to rookies on the force who are decades younger than him.
Long before Williams learned she’d be directing an episode, she was a longtime fan of the show, she told EntertainmentNOW, explaining, “It was one of those shows that made me feel like I had faith in how things were supposed to go … where the good guys are the cops and the bad guys are the bad guys. It’s just a really feel-good show where policemen are modern-day heroes.”
As simplistic as that might sound, Williams acknowledged, filming her episode of “The Rookie” was an “incredibly complex” process. What she directed is considered a “true crime” episode. Showrunner Alexi Hawley, whom Williams called “an absolute genius,” narrates the storyline like a typical true crime documentary. Williams said they filmed a dizzying four storylines “in four different mediums” during a shortened seven-day shoot before Thanksgiving.
Of the script, “brilliantly written” by longtime show writer Nick Hurwitz, Williams said, “It was the most complex episode of television I’ve ever read. There were 116 scenes in the episode. Usually, there’s about 65 in an episodic show.”
Despite “so many challenges,” Williams loved the experience, telling EntertainmentNOW that “directing is a place (where) I feel very at home, very confident” and that she had a great rapport with the cast and crew. Although she spent days editing scenes after the shoot, she won’t see the finished product until it airs.
Williams celebrated that “it is a big deal” to direct an episode of such a popular series, but her viewing party will be very low-key, she laughed — likely with her husband, filmmaker Neal Dodson, and a “bottle of sparkling water.”
While juggling her roles at Hallmark, Williams spent four months studying past episodes of “The Rookie,” she told EntertainmentNOW.
“I did this drill as part of my training,” she said, thanks to guidance she got from fellow director Tessa Blake. “It’s incredible advice for up-and-coming directors: if you want to direct on a show, get the script of an episode, set a timer for five hours and entirely prep the entire episode. So, the shot list, the story arc, the entire thing. Think about color, think about music, think about transitions for the entire episode, and then diagram each scene.”
“Then watch the episode,” Williams continued, “and then get a hold of the director and interview them about their choices. I did that for four straight months on ‘The Rookie.’”
Williams, a mom of two boys, told EntertainmentNOW that to map out scenes with multiple characters, she used her kids’ Lego and Duplo figures and acted out each scene with the toys.
“We have a bunch of police officer Duplos, which really came in handy for ‘The Rookie,’” she laughed.
The season seven episode Williams directed is called “A Deadly Secret.” According to ABC’s logline, it follows two documentary filmmakers as they “interview the LAPD on a complicated missing person’s case connected to John.” The episode premieres on April 22 at 9 p.m. Eastern time.
