‘FBI,’ ‘FBI: Most Wanted’ Stars on Tackling COVID-19 and Racial Injustice
‘FBI’s Missy Peregrym and Zeeko Zaki, and ‘Most Wanted’s Julian McMahon and Kellan Lutz preview the new seasons.
FBI and FBI: Most Wanted are back solving crimes.
On Tuesday’s season 3 premiere, the FBI team welcomes back Special Agent Maggie Bell (Missy Peregrym), who was away on an undercover assignment, and introduces new team member Special Agent Tiffany Wallace (Katherine Renee Turner), as they search for the killers responsible for a mass shooting at a media company. But Maggie’s partner, OA (Zeeko Zaki), has a personal connection with the case that threatens to cloud his judgment.
Peregrym went on maternity leave on FBI near the end of the shortened sophomore season and gave birth to her first child, a baby boy, with husband Tom Oakley in April. As Peregrym hinted, Maggie reacclimating herself back with the team from her tough undercover stint will take some time.
“We deal with that immediately with the season premiere. It’s done in a very interesting way because OA’s character is dealing with his informant and this is a circumstance that was really difficult for Maggie undercover,” the 38-year-old actress told ET’s Matt Cohen over Zoom recently. “So it’s kind of nice how they did that where it’s both of our storylines. But we’re right back into business. I’m excited to be back and have my partner, however, there is a new person in my life from undercover, and so it gets a little bit dramatic, personally.”
Peregrym played coy when asked to elaborate on Maggie’s new love interest. “There’s just other people that have been working with [her] while [she] was undercover and they are present here. There is potential for romance and we’ll see where it goes,” she hinted.
With FBI incorporating COVID-19 and real-world injustices into the fabric of the show, Zaki expressed the importance of exploring the realities of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement with care.
“I think the goal of everybody is to have everything have its right place and enough of it to give it justice and to honor everything we’re going through without taking away from our true job of entertaining,” Zaki said. “The Dick Wolf equation forever has been to stay right on the 50-yard line when dicey topics, politics and a lot of the stuff that we’ve gone through over the past six months has dabbled in those worlds. So we’re very prepared to stay neutral when it comes to political things. In each scene and each day, as we’re filming, we find these little moments to bring in COVID or to bring in the BLM [movement] and to sprinkle them enough. But at the end of the day, we’ve all experienced this in real life so it’s nice to be at month six when we’re kind of coming back and film and to try and normalize all of this as much as possible.”
“It’s tricky,” Peregrym added. “Even just with wearing masks, it’s not great for television, you can’t see our face and see what we’re going through. However, it’s really important that we choose places to show that this is the time that we’re in. And it’s so weird, I don’t know how you feel when you’re watching TV and you see that no one’s wearing masks because you’re like, ‘Oh my god, they’re so close, what’s happening?’ Like, I have a visceral reaction to it when I see that, even in public. It’s really hard not to incorporate that to a certain degree and I think it’s important that we do. There’s a responsibility there that we’re all really trying hard to do that in a way where you can still watch us and we can still do our job.”
Zaki agreed, adding: “It’s fun and exciting to get to do some of these things that haven’t been done yet on television. We haven’t come out of a pandemic but getting to do the elbows instead of handshakes and the masks and getting to play it so normal, it’s kind of exciting and hoping that it kind of triggers this feeling of, ‘Oh wow, they played that off like it’s not a big deal and we’re moving together and we’re all evolving on the same path.'”
