Mix a knight-in-shining armor moment, alcohol, and shirtless triage, and what do you get? Lucy Chen (Melissa O’Neil) and Tim Bradford (Eric Winter) having Valentine’s Day ex sex on The Rookie.
That’s exactly what happened in the latest episode, after Lucy volunteered to patch up a cut on the back of his neck after he intervened when a guest got too drunk at a charity gala. They headed up to a hotel room, he took off his shirt so she could get to the cut, and well, sparks flew.
“I was excited to see all of the messy ramp up and having them be awkward around each other. And when they had their moment in the hotel, I was admittedly feeling a little bit protective and like, ‘Well, wait a minute. They haven’t had a conversation. What’s happening here?’” O’Neil admitted on TV Insider’s Booked: The Rookie Aftershow for the episode. After speaking with the writers and Winter, she called it “a good exercise for me as an actor to trust the process” as well as “a really wonderful opportunity to collaborate with Eric. There’s a lot of great places for us to figure out and dialogue with each other. ‘Okay, how do you want to play this? How can we help tell this story as best as we can?’”
Ultimately, she sees what happened as “the compulsion, the irresistibility of a connection that you know exists there. And even though she’s very career-minded in this moment, there’s privacy, there’s proximity, and there’s just the knowledge of what exists there.”
O’Neil added, “I kind of feel like that moment is a moment out of time for them. There’s no supervision. They both look really beautiful because they got dressed up for this evening. She had the best intentions when she went up there and probably was trying to deny parts of herself. And then in that moment it’s just, it’s pheromones. They’re so close to each other.”
The next morning was awkward, to say the least. He brought up talking, but she was ready to just call it a classic case of Valentine’s Day ex sex and leave it at that. He agreed. She added they could go back to normal and headed for the room she’d booked for the night. But it did look like Lucy was at least thinking about going back inside the room after the exes parted with awkward finger points.
O’Neil shared that she wasn’t sure how she wanted to play that moment. “Was she also on board with it just being a thing, like we’re good? Or was she caught off guard?” she said. “I remember wanting to make sure that there was continuity with how we played it later because they go right back into working with each other and it’s not all the way awkward, but there’s a little bit of shifting ground beneath them. So I think when she’s standing outside, [it’s] a mix of wanting to go back, but also knowing that she shouldn’t. It’s messy. And I think she wants to be clear. I think if there’s any through line for Lucy’s journey with her at work romances, it’s that she very much doesn’t want her professionalism to be compromised despite herself.”
Near the end of the episode, Lucy tells Tim that it can never happen again, but once it happens once… “I don’t believe her,” O’Neil said with a laugh. “I think that’s a big part of Lucy’s character. She’s aspirational and she wants to align herself in a virtuous way and be in integrity with her profession. So, I’m sure she really means it, but she’s still a human, and that’s one of the things I love about her. She’s not just some statue that exists as an archetype. She’s flawed.”
Don’t be surprised if going forward, Lucy and Tim try to keep it very professional and “stay a little bit separated,” O’Neil said. “It’s always really fun for us to see them doing what they’re the best at, which is, sure, being in love with each other, but more than that, being really good at their job and they’re really excellent teammates.”
Right now, Chenford fans are left wondering if the exes have a future. We have a strong feeling they do, but it does feel like it’s going to be a bit of a wait.
“My perspective for much of the season was that she was on the back foot waiting for him to step forward, do all of these things that he said he was going to do, initiate these conversations. And at the same time, after I dialogued with [showrunner] Alexi [Hawley] about what was going on in the scripts, it was really important to him that she had agency in these situations and was reclaiming her power and connecting with him when she wanted to on her terms because of how everything ended,” O’Neil explained.
“And because Bradford knew that he had really messed up their threads of trust in how he departed their relationship, that Bradford was also on the back foot waiting for her cue. So I do feel like there’s a little bit of both of them kind of sussing each other out, trying to figure out, well, what are you going to do? How are you going to be with me?” she continued. “But ultimately when they’re at work, [they] check all their business at the door and just come in and do their job. And I really appreciate that about the two of them.”
