Toni Trucks says she takes female representation on SEAL Team personally because she knows “women are often forgotten” when it comes to seeing women in the military.
On SEAL Team, Trucks plays Lisa Davis, who has been a key female character on the series from the beginning. She’s also a character who has evolved in some major ways over the course of the series. But now nearing the end of the show’s fifth season — the SEAL Team Season 5 finale airs this Sunday, January 23rd — Davis is in a bit of a difficult spot when it comes to her career.
I recently had the chance to chat with Trucks about how her character has evolved since Season 1, the importance of female representation on SEAL Team, and the creative ways the show hid her pregnancy this season.
Trucks said she feels that Lisa Davis has “evolved multiple times and continues to do so,” since Season 1. “Lisa started out as the Intel officer — really more logistics. So I was packing the parachutes, and reading, getting drone footage.”
“We continue to see even now in Season 5, this hunger for upward mobility and for more responsibility. And so every season, she clicked up. The second season, she was able to go into Officer Candidate School, which was such a big thing. And then graduate to being the official Intel Officer for the team. And now we find her in Season 5 doing this fellowship with the DoD,” Trucks said. “She just keeps pushing the limit as to where she can be the most effective, and trying to just be more brave in her responsibilities.”
Trucks also believes breaking out of her comfort zone makes sense for her character.
“For a long time with Lisa Davis, you saw her seeking comfort and stability [within] the team, because her own home life was so tumultuous that she just really was hanging on to them with bloody fingernails. And now, I think she’s seeing that there’s a price to pay for that, and where else can she be effective? So it’s a fun adventure and journey for her.”
Of course, we also know that Davis’s career could be in jeopardy because of the paper she’s written for her fellowship, which discusses lessons learned from Afghanistan and how to better protect the country’s warfighters.
“I think that she keeps thinking of what am I really doing, what’s my bigger purpose here,” Trucks said. “I think what she’s seeing is that although Lisa Davis is a person that loves to color in the lines and follow rules, there are things that can be done better. You hear her again and again throughout the season keep saying we need to prioritize our warfighters over warfighting. And that we’re not doing a good job of taking care of the human beings behind these initiatives, behind these larger goals, and that’s the travesty.”
“Even the fact that Commander Blackburn doesn’t like it is devastating for her because I think she’s just thinking ‘This is a no-brainer. Everyone’s obviously going to agree with me.’ And they do not,” Trucks added. “The only reason she went on this mission [in Venezuela] was to try to save her butt and do something that would maybe give her a little bit of a leg up if she is to ultimately get in major trouble for this paper that she’s written that is bringing everybody under fire for how they’re treating the special ops.”
Trucks also discussed the importance of female representation on SEAL Team, and the influence she’s had over making sure that representation is authentic.
“I welcome any more women on this show. I was able to go on USO tours and engage with the military in a lot of different ways since working on SEAL Team, and I really feel such a responsibility and pride about representing them week after week. So I think it is of the utmost importance that we continue to show women in this space,” Trucks said. “I’m all about seeing women in the military reflected on our screens because it’s so impactful to the audience members.”
“I think when people think about the military, they tend to think about men, which is not correct. And so we’ve had days on set where I’ve come and I’ll be like, ‘This feels weird in here — what’s happening?’ And I’ll be like, ‘Oh, there’s only male extras.’ On our worst day, we should always have at least 20-25% women in this room, no matter what. I was like, ‘We need to see the women.’ They’re there. They’re in high ranking, high stakes, high level, dangerous jobs. There is no reason that we shouldn’t see them. So I’ve really celebrated when our show shows the female pilots, the captains… They’re to be found and they’re to be highlighted.”
Trucks told me that she doesn’t need to point out those things much anymore compared to early in the series.
“This is years ago now. They were onto me pretty quickly. I was always like, ‘What’s happening here?’ I was policing the scripts. I’m like, ‘I don’t think this should be this way,’” she said.
“They’ve been wonderful, and they anticipate those things now so beautifully. It’s not something that comes up with any regularity now, it’s just something that I’m always looking out for in the storytelling.”
“So even something as small as language — I remember in Season 1, I was talking to Mandy and I said, ‘Oh, these guys think about me like their sister.’ And I went to the writers during that time, [and] I said, ‘Why don’t I just say I think about those guys as my brother? Why am I doing that emotional journey to tell her what they think, as opposed to just saying what I think?’” Trucks recalled.
“It’s those tiny little details that are empowering us all the time with language and perspective when we’re storytelling. So I just have to just keep an eye on it. And SEAL Team has been wonderful about navigating that because I’m in a male-dominated space, but they’re taking good care.”
For her own character specifically, that’s also something Trucks has kept her eye on.
“I’ve personally struggled when Davis has had those dips where she’s struggling in her job and things like that. I’ve had those times that I’ve not trusted what’s going on, and I’m going to the writers, and I’m saying, ‘I can’t have the only woman on this show be doing a bad job for too long. So what’s going on?’ And they’re always like, ‘Just trust the process, trust the process, trust the process.’ And it always has panned out where I can really trust that journey for her, so we can root for her when she succeeds,” Trucks said.
Trucks is also currently expecting a baby and told me she continued filming SEAL Team up until she was seven months pregnant. That meant the show had to get a little creative with hiding her pregnancy.
“We had a lot of tall computers, carrying a coffee tray. At one point I was carrying a file box in, and when I got there, all the guys were carrying file boxes behind me. And when they handed me mine, it had a hole cut out for my belly, so it just fit right over my belly. So they had a lot of fun with hiding the pregnancy,” she laughed.
“Actually it’s been so crazy because this is my most active season, chasing people down, tackling people. On this last episode, I mean, you see it [briefly], but I had days and days of ax throwing classes to get that bullseye perfect. And I was like, ‘This is hysterical.’ This is the season where I’m like, ‘Hey, how about you go seduce the guy at the bar as a deterrent.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, let’s do it!’”
