‘Law & Order’: Hugh Dancy Says Price Taking the Stand Was ‘Not Very Comfortable’ & ‘Really Fun’
Q&A
Hugh Dancy steps out of ADA Nolan Price’s comfort zone in the March 30 episode of Law & Order.
In “Bias,” after a public defender is murdered, Detective Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Detective Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) are surprised to find Price at the crime scene, and his involvement in the trial compromises the case.
Here, Dancy previews the episode and talks about taking the stand.
Price is involved in this case in a very different way from usual. What’s going on and where is his head at as a result?
Hugh Dancy: He finds the body. He’s involved just in the sense that he’s there, right at the beginning of the show. But it’s also the case that the victim is somebody who he has a connection to. So he has multiple vested interests, let’s say.
And you’re not just in court!
That’s right. I got to escape the courtroom for a brief second and what I learned is that cops tend to work at night. [Laughs] There I was on the West Side Highway at midnight thinking, “Oh, OK, I see. Yeah, this is different.” It was fun.
Scott Gries/NBC
The promo shows Price being accused of the crime. What leads to that?
I am accused of that, and I’m accused of that while sitting in the witness chair in the courtroom. So even though I am a prosecutor and I am the prosecutor in this case, at least for some part of it, the tables get turned there and they — rightly probably exactly as Price might do, if he was the one interrogating — say, “Well, you found the body. How do we know you didn’t have a hand in it?”
Speaking of that, with Price taking the stand, how was that for him and also how was that for you filming it to be on the other side of questioning in a courtroom?
Yeah, it was, for him, not very comfortable for various reasons, which I won’t mention because they would be spoilers. And for me, great. It was really fun. I spend half my life in that courtroom, so anything that switches it up a bit is fun, first of all. And I feel like anything that switches it up in the episode is fun as well.
In the previous episode, Price had to let a violent criminal walk to get his testimony. How does he handle things like that?
He is a pragmatist. I feel like in the show, the way it works is that in any given episode, any one of the three of us on the prosecuting team — meaning myself, McCoy [Sam Waterston], or Maroun [Odelya Halevi] — might have a particularly strong feeling from a morally principled point of view and the other two will be saying, “Well, that’s all very well, but we need to get the result. It’s all very well having that standing on that principle, but we also need to put this person away.” And it can be a different one of us on any given episode depending on what the case is. But I think Price thinks a lot and cares a lot about justice one way or the other.
Do you think he has the easiest or the hardest time shaking something off like that and moving on to the next case?
He’s like any of us who’ve been doing a job for quite a while. He’s of a certain age. He’s been doing this for quite a long time and he’s good at it. So I think he allows himself to care about it while he’s doing it, just like I do with my job, and then when it’s over, he allows himself to move on.
Law & Order, Thursdays, 8/7c, NBC
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