We’re hitting the streets of Los Angeles again with our blue and red lights, blaring sirens, and “Daddy Cop” on the radio as Season 8 of The Rookie is given delightful updates at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con.
The cop procedural is one of the most talked-about on TV at the moment, giving us iconic lines and an even more iconic will-they-won’t-they romance in the form of Chenford. We started with a group of rookie cops stumbling their way around a police station and their TO’s shops, but now, the show has taken flight, quite literally, as Season 8 kicks off in Prague after the rollercoaster of the Season 7 finale, where new villains are forced to work with our favorite L.A. cops.
Cast member Nathan Fillion, who plays John Nolan, and writer Alexi Hawley sat down with Collider’s Steve Weintraub at SDCC 2025 to talk about the new season. Before delving into The Rookie, they recall their favorite theaters, and Fillion reveals a quirky yet sweet habit he has on set. Following the announcement that Season 8’s first episode is in Prague, Hawley reveals how the show managed the logistics and budget through thrifty “pod-car” episodes, including the unusual rigs and skills these special cars demand from the cast. They also tease Season 8, including a coveted update on Chenford’s future, while Fillion also teases his “F-Bomb” filled involvement in Netflix’s upcoming show, Lanterns, following his role in Superman. You can hear all about this straight from Fillion and Hawley in the video above, or you can read the transcript below.
‘The Rookie’s Nathan Fillion Gifts Guest Stars Gadgets on Set
“A welcome gift.”
COLLIDER: I have so many questions for you about The Rookie, but I like throwing a few curves at the beginning. I’m obsessed with getting more people to see movies in movie theaters. For both of you, do you have a favorite movie theater?
NATHAN FILLION: I do.
ALEXI HAWLEY: I know what you’re going to say. Go ahead.
FILLION: Mine is the IPIC. There’s one in Westwood, there’s one in Pasadena. It’s reclining chairs, some good food. I go when I’m hungry and don’t eat beforehand. That’s the way to see a movie.
HAWLEY: I like The [Chinese] because the two times I’ve been there have been for premieres, both for Superman and then for Exorcist: The Beginning, which was the prequel that I was the last writer standing on. So, it felt like it was the premiere movie theater.
Here at Comic-Con, a lot of people collect things. Do you collect anything, or if you’re on the Comic-Con floor, what would you be looking for?
HAWLEY: I have a fairly large comic book collection. That being said, I haven’t actually collected comics in a while, at this point. I kind of fell off on it. Honestly, my old eyes have a hard time reading comics now. There’s something about panel layouts and stuff that’s a little harder for me to input it.
FILLION: You just do the iPad apps for comics because they make the panels much bigger. I collect flashlights and fidgets.
Nathan Fillion and Alexi Hawley at SDCC 2025 for The Rookie Season 8Image via Alex Cobian
Are you being sincere?
FILLION: Not the spinners. More like clickety clack things with haptic kind of magnetic… Yeah. They quiet my mind.
HAWLEY: Nathan’s a very big gadget guy.
FILLION: I love gadgets. I collect gadgets, as well.
HAWLEY: He’s also very generous. Any time anybody comes to set, guest stars, stuff like that, they’ll find something in their trailer.
FILLION: A welcome gift. Some nice headphones, a battery for their phones, a Bluetooth speaker, or something like that.
Hawley Talks Navigating a Police Show in Today’s Political Climate
“Policing was a complicated, and still remains a complicated thing.”
Nathan, I have an individual question for you. Most actors, if they win the actor lottery, they get to be on one show that lasts multiple seasons. You have won the actor’s lottery a lot. You had Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place. You had Castle. Now you have The Rookie. I don’t know what the question is, but how the F have you done it? Because it is impossible to do what you’ve managed to do.
FILLION: I can’t tell you, “If you do this, then you’ll get TV shows, and they’ll run for a long time,” but I will tell you that the three steps to what I consider being successful are: be lucky, be grateful, and pretend to be bold.
Have you sent a thank-you card to Robot Chicken for helping you get Green Lantern?
FILLION: Actually, Robot Chicken got me in there because I was Green Lantern before for Andrew Romano. She used to pilfer the Joss Whedon projects for casting different DC shows, WB stuff, all the animated stuff. So I was Hal Jordan in that first, and then Robot Chicken had me continue that role, and I think kept me in the minds of those who think about Green Lantern.
If you watch Robot Chicken now, it’s very funny.
On The Rookie, every season, and especially the first few seasons, you learn how to make a show, like what you can do in the budget, what you can do on the schedule. How has the show refined its process, or is it like you have a process for each season, each week, and you have a machine that’s really synced up?
HAWLEY: It’s a bit of a complicated answer, partly just because of the obstacles that we’ve all gone through over the last eight years, with the pandemic and the strike, and with the murder of George Floyd and having to deal with how to be a police show in a time where policing was a complicated, and still remains a complicated thing. I think Season 1 was a traditional Season 1, where we did some stuff right, we did some stuff wrong, and we did some stuff as a clusterfuck. Ultimately, that’s where you start to learn how to make the show, what’s expensive that you didn’t think would be expensive, and how to do a smaller episode.
At this point, having gone through all of those things, we definitely know the kind of episodes we can do that are small budget-wise, but don’t feel small when you watch them. This season allowed us to go to Prague and go $1 million over budget on that first episode, knowing that we had ways to be commensurately under budget during the course of the season to get us back to even.
FILLION: It is a dance. Alexi has the legs of a dancer.
‘The Rookie’ Uses “Pod-Cars” to Make Small-Budget Episodes
“It allows the show to really just exist driving around the world.”
I always make a joke about Star Trek and how in some episodes the ship would lose power and everyone had flashlights, and it was a flashlight episode, because in three episodes, there was going to be a huge Klingon battle. You’ve got to save your money and pick your battles. Your Season 7 finale had helicopters, and it was a really big episode. Had you purposely been saving to deploy additional resources for the finale?
HAWLEY: Yes, exactly. We usually go big at the beginning and big at the end, and then during the course of the season, we have certain episodes that we know… They used to be called bottles, right? A bottle episode, that’s the one where everybody’s trapped in a room, and that’s the whole episode. We actually do a version of bottles where we’re out running around the city. One of them is, we call it the “pod-car” episode, which we only film after the very beginning and get out of at the end on body cameras and dash cams and security cameras. The whole storytelling is that. We shoot a lot faster that way, because the cameras are the cameras, we don’t have extra takes or extra setups. They’ve gotten really good at being camera operators themselves. They actually compete a little bit about who can get a cleaner shot and all that kind of stuff. So, that’s one.
The true-crime documentary episodes that we started doing during the pandemic are other ones, because there’s so much talking head stuff that they end up being smaller episodes, but they don’t feel small. I think it’s a little unique to our show, given that we do so many different things, that we can do that, and you feel like you’re not missing out on anything.
Alexi Hawley at SDCC 2025 for The Rookie Season 8Image by Alex Cobian
Nathan, what do you think would surprise fans to learn about the making of this series, or being on set?
FILLION: I think they’d be surprised to see what the pod-car — we keep mentioning this pod-car — what that rig actually looks like. When we’re in the pod-car, there are about five cameras and lights set up across the front and coming into the windows on the side. We can’t see anything out the front. There’s a fella in a rig up at the top who was actually doing all the driving. We are in a caravan: about six motorcycle cops, two vans full of crew and directors. We’re all connected, and we drive around the city trying to make sure we match the light for the direction we’re going in. We have to hit those lines. It’s hard to go back. Those are interesting.
HAWLEY: But that’s literally why the show is the show, the pod-car, because we’re literally driving around Los Angeles. We’re filming out the windows, we’re filming them in the environment. We’re doing it basically in real time because we shoot both directions at the same time, which means if you have Nathan in one scene, and let’s say Celina in the other, then we’re shooting them both at the same time, so you don’t have to go back and match coverage. If he had a great moment at a stoplight, we don’t have to find a stoplight. It’s being filmed in real time. It allows the show to really just exist driving around the world rather than process trailers and all that.
FILLION: But it’s a real team effort. We are all in it, and it is a choreographed effort. It’s a lot of fun, but it takes experience. But we have a crew. These guys are fantastic. These guys are fantastic, and the cast knows their job.
