‘NCIS: Sydney’ Star Todd Lasance Breaks Down Finale Cliffhangers: ‘I Threw My Script’
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the NCIS: Sydney Season 1 finale, “Blonde Ambition.”]
Would you go as far as JD (Todd Lasance) did to get his son back? The Australian Federal Police (AFP) sergeant made a decision in the NCIS: Sydney finale that has to come back to haunt the team at some point.
After his son was kidnapped — by a clown at his birthday party (a.k.a. nightmare fuel) — JD chose to go along with the demands: a swap of a wanted criminal (Georgina Haig‘s Ana Niemus, obviously not her real name, given how it sounds like “anonymous”) the team had been after all season. He also trusted “Ana” with a gun, which, after using to kill the kidnapper, she then turned on him. She did leave JD alive, but she took his keys and the kidnapper’s gun and escaped.
But JD doesn’t regret any of what he did, given his son is alive — and that’s something Lasance can completely understand. The end result “completely justified all of his choices, particularly to push outside of what would be acceptable as law enforcement,” the star tells TV Insider. “I’d do the same thing. Being a father, there’s no decision that JD made that I would personally question, even though it does push the elements of staying in the constraints of the law.”
That part of the show, asking where a person’s moral compass is and where they draw the line, is something he appreciates. “He almost blows the case,” Lasance points out. “He obviously loses their prime suspect, but he’s also planted these little seeds in her to make her question her own alliance as well. So he’s so strategic. He’s so smart with stuff.”
But what he didn’t see coming is the shocking reveal at the end of the episode. Before Ana left JD and his son, she gave him the kidnapper’s phone and suggested he use it to “phone a friend. You might be surprised who answers.” And when he called the number on it, back at the team’s headquarters, the phone of the Department of Defense’s Rankin (Lewis Fitz-Gerald) rang. Mackey (Olivia Swann) and the others ended the season staring him down; JD has no idea who’s on the other line.
“He has suspicions of his actions and his integrity, but I think that’s the cliffhanger that I was dreaming of,” Lasance says. “When I read that line from Mackey, ‘Are you going to get that?’ in the script, I threw my script. I was like, ‘You have got — this is epic.’ The fact that she goes for her gun and he’s standing there. There’s one number related to our ultimate enemy in the series that he has been potentially covering for and associated with throughout the whole season. I love that juice. That’s the best. That’s fantastic writing. That’s fantastic plotting from our writers and Morgan [O’Neill], our showrunner. So, yeah, integrity speaking, he was suspicious of him, and I think he had questionable actions, but to be associated solely potentially with our biggest enemy figure, I don’t think they thought that that was possible, which is great for the story.”
Daniel Asher Smith/Paramount+
It was how “emotionally driven” JD is that Lasance wanted to push in the finale. “I didn’t want to hold back on any of that, and there are scenes in there where I pushed the emotion a lot more than what was on the page,” he shares. “Some of the scenes didn’t require him breaking down or him losing it, but on the day, I listened to a lot of scores. I brought in my daughter’s favorite stuffy with me, and I had that in my pocket in some of the scenes or just off set and I’d step aside and just sort of spend time with it and listen to music. And then I looked at photos of my son prepping for certain scenes. So some moments came to me that weren’t planned, that weren’t on the page that they used in the show as well.”
Among those is one that arose during a scene JD shared with Doc Roy (William McInnes) about family and the cost of what they do (and who pays it). “That was one of my favorite scenes, and we didn’t plan any of that emotion,” according to Lasance. “I remember working with William on it, and at the end of shooting the scene, we just turned to each other and gave each other a hug and pat each other on the back. It was just one of those unspoken moments.”
He continues, “Working with Will, he’s so phenomenal, and we were so engaged on that scene that the emotion that was coming — there’s actually more, and they cut around some of it. When I was looking at photos of my son on the phone, tears started streaming down. They cut around little things like that to keep that emotion in check so that the payoff is a lot higher at the end. But when Will was telling me his story, there was no acting in that. I was listening to that story myself as a human, father, and brother to Will. A human connection was there, and it was all real.”
Count Lasance in as someone who’s hoping there’s a second season of the first international series in the hit NCIS franchise. “If we go again, I spoke to the showrunner about his ideas as to where he wants to take the show and where he’d want to pick it up. It’s awesome. It’s super exciting where they want to go, and obviously, the relationship’s now opened up with his son and his ex-wife and the team,” he says. “It’s game on now, which is great. So it’s exciting for the show and the characters to see where they’re going to go.”
Let’s just hope we get to see it. What did you think of the first season of Sydney? Let us know in the comments below.
NCIS: Sydney, Season 1, Streaming Now, Paramount+
