‘S.W.A.T.’: Kenny Johnson on His Emotional Farewell & Moment That Made His Mom Mad

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for S.W.A.T. Season 7 Episode 7 “Last Call.”]

The good news: Luca (Kenny Johnson) is alive, despite taking a bullet to the chest. The bad news: His days with S.W.A.T. are over.

In Johnson’s final episode of S.W.A.T., Luca learns that due to permanent nerve damage, his hand and arm will never move the same again. S.W.A.T. has been his whole life, and a supervisory role is just not for him. And so he retires, with a heartfelt conversation with Hondo (Shemar Moore) on the beach then the call of the end of his watch.

Below, Johnson opens up about Luca’s ending and filming those emotional last scenes for his character.

Luca has to deal with the fact that he can’t return to S.W.A.T.

Kenny Johnson: That’s a tough pill to swallow. I can’t do a desk job. Luca has a hard time emotionally wrapping around the fact that he can’t go out and be the best that he can at what he does. He was born into S.W.A.T. That’s all he’s ever known. His whole heart and conscience, I would say, is about giving and saving and protecting. And he wants to be out there actively doing it; whether he gives his life up for it or not, it’s something that he does selflessly, I think.

I can’t do this, so I’m going to do something else. And then Hondo trying to say, “No, you can go out there and meet somebody new. You can surf the biggest waves.” And I’m thinking like, “Oh, yeah, okay, that’s going to parallel S.W.A.T. At this point in my life?” I’m laughing now, but for Luca, it’s not funny. All I know is it’s being taken away and I have to accept it.

When a show has to end or your character has to leave—when I did The Shield, at the end of Season 5 and they killed me off, and it was the beginning of the end for the show, and they needed to do that in order to make it kind of unravel for Shawn [Ryan] to end The Shield. It was crushing for my heart because they were my best friends, and we always thought we were going to go through to the end together, and it was shattering. But I thought, it’s all for a reason, for the greater good of the show. At least for The Shield, it was what needed to happen in order for Shawn to end the series in seven seasons. But it was really hard.

Bill Inoshita/Sony Pictures Television/CBS

And I think for this, it’s the same thing. He’s trying to wrap his head around it, and at the same time, it’s all happening so fast that it’s emotionally just a mind-f**k because it’s life-changing. You don’t really have time to understand how to accept it and be like, “Oh, I’ll just give into everything and it’ll be okay.” But he’s got to now do that in a very short amount of time.

Speaking of that scene between Luca and Honda, talk about filming that on the beach with Shemar. It was so good.

I’ve known Shemar since the early ‘90s. I had met him when I first started acting and I think he first started acting through a mutual friend, Cree Summer. I remember connecting with him and just talking with this guy for a long time that night. He didn’t know me, I didn’t know him, but it felt like he was my brother. I love the freshness and the newness of the way he looks at life because I look at it the same way, the potential for anything to happen in this lifetime and it’s all beginning now. So from that to now is a long time. I’d see Shemar in a boxing gym—we used to go to the same one for 10 years—and then here we are on the same series, and having to leave, for me, becomes personal because you actually have a connection with somebody for that long period of time.

And he called me into his trailer and he wanted to play a song for me, his feelings, I think, without saying anything. So I listened to it with him, and then I just went into my trailer and we didn’t talk and waited until we were on the beach. He was pacing, doing his thing, prepping, I was sitting down trying to prep my scene, and we just kind of made it as real as we could—not about, we’re S.W.A.T., but we’re two human beings and we’re at a crossroads where neither of us expected, and I don’t know what to do. He’s trying to be positive about it as a friend, as a human being. I just know it felt very real and kind of beautiful.

Then there was that last scene, saying goodbye to Luca. 

It was, for me, emotional. We’ve been together going on seven years now, and we all started together, and you obviously build a trust and a bond, and it’s not like we’re doing 13 episodes. We do 22 episodes a year normally, and so there’s so much time together and we all love each other. We genuinely love each other, which is great. We work out together, we eat together, we sit together, and we do the scenes together. So when I would look out into Jay [Harrington]‘s eyes or to Anna [Enger Ritch]‘s eyes or David Lim, they were all teared up because it’s a personal bond we’ve earned together. There’s a real true love and connection there.

So I just let that dictate the scene because I knew what the scene was and I knew I was going, but for me personally, I’m going and I’m saying goodbye to these guys. It was emotional. It was hard, especially saying the very last words. And then when they came on stage…  I love love, and at the same time I’m saying goodbye, but there’s love there. So it was full of a lot of mixed feelings, I think.

Bill Inoshita/Sony Pictures Television/CBS

Do you have any sense of what the next chapter could be for Luca or how he could figure that out? Because, as he says, he never planned on leaving S.W.A.T.

Yeah, I laugh because again, Hondo saying, “You could go find the girl of your dreams or ride the biggest waves,” I’m like, “This point in my life, that’s not going to top S.W.A.T., man.” So I don’t know. I’m still in the middle of probably personally going, yeah, what is next? I know I’m working on Mayor of Kingstown back and forth recurring last season and this season, but for me, when you’re used to having a home, it’s a lost space for a little bit. Where is the universe going to take you?

And I think really Luca’s in that. Is it his food truck? No, it was S.W.A.T. Is it the waves? Sure he loves the waves but it was all to be tranquil for S.W.A.T., you know what I mean? Am I going to find the girl in my dreams at this point? I’m like, he never has. It’s not really what he’s trying to do. It’s a great question because I don’t think Luca still knows.

And you’ve gotten to work with your daughter, Angelica Johnson, on S.W.A.T. How has that been, especially with that scene of Luca being shot?

I love working with Angelica. We had done three films prior to this, and she’s an awesome girl. She’s like my best friend, and so everything we do is always awesome. It is always a really great experience to bond with her, but watching her [character] grow from not being able to read when Luca first meets her and then tries to help her with her mom and her reading, getting her into the school, and then she becomes a little journalist and then all of a sudden she’s got to move away and I’ve got to let that be her mom’s decision.

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Shemar Moore Talks 'S.W.A.T.' Ending: 'Maybe It's the Final Season, Maybe It's Not'

Angelica just does everything. I never tell her how to do anything. All I do is support her choices in things. We talk about situations and what the stakes are and everything like that, and she does her own homework on it. I respect her as a whole human being and an actress, and it’s a really cool bond. So when we did that scene, I don’t think we’d even touched the emotionality of what that would do to somebody. She went into it and did her own work. And then the night before, we were at her acting class and she had worked on other scenes, and I said to her, “Do you want to do one time out loud me getting shot?” She goes, “Yeah, I think so.” So we went into this room and instinctually we went through [it], it was like boom. I think she believed it so much, her running up and jumping down and screaming out. As I was laying on this floor of this acting room, I literally had tears in my eyes because I could feel it in her voice. I said, “You’re good. When you go out there, just instinctually go. If you want to think it’s me, your dad, if you want think it’s Luca…”

My mother got mad at me. I remember she saw the promo—she lives in Vermont and she doesn’t really watch TV—and she called me and she goes, “Oh my God, Kenny, what an awful thing to do to your daughter!” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” She goes, “You let her watch you die in front of her. That is the most awful thing.” I’m like, “Mom, mom, mom, mom, this is acting. We’re pretending. It’s not really real.” She goes, “But the thought of it, how could you do that to her?”

But Angelica did really, really well. And even in the car scene driving, when I scream at her—normally, that’s not in my character, me as a person, I don’t scream at her—I’m like, “Oh, this feels so uncomfortable. I feel like such a dick right now.” Angelica allowed it on the last couple takes to affect her, and it was really cool to watch her get emotional, but it wasn’t because I was mad at her. It was because she said she knew it was her last episode with her and I together and she got super emotional about it. She used that in the scene because I saw her kind of shaking a little bit before they said action and I could see in her eyes she had tears. In my head, I’m going, “Oh, she’s going somewhere right now, which is really cool.”

S.W.A.T., Fridays, 8/7c, CBS