‘Chicago P.D.’: Patrick John Flueger on Ruzek’s Curb Moment & Remembering Martel

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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Chicago P.D. Season 12 Episode 2 “Blood Bleeds Blue.”]

For most of the latest Chicago P.D. episode, Officer Adam Ruzek (Patrick John Flueger) is in a daze, clearly affected by Detective Emily Martel’s (Victoria Cartagena) death—he doesn’t even want to believe she’s dead at first, because he’s known her for a long time—and then moving to stop the man responsible, a father who has put his family in danger.

The man shoots his wife, kidnaps one son, and is going after the other—who arms himself with his uncle’s gun and has plans to go after his father. In the end, the kids are safe, and that’s when Ruzek finally takes a moment and sits down on the curb. Patrol officer Kiana Cook (Toya Turner), with him every step of the way in this episode, sits next to him. The only words they exchange are his “Well done, officer,” and her “You, too, officer.”

“Brian Luce, one of our producers and our tech guy, 21 years on the job as a police officer, told me that the curb is the police officer’s park bench. And when you see an officer sit down like that to try and take a load off, it’s like everybody knows what’s going on,” Flueger tells TV Insider. “You can just arrive on scene, and if you see somebody sitting like that on the stoop, not moving, not running around doing their job, there’s a reason for it. And he called it the police officer’s park bench. That made my eyes wet just when he said it. So it was kind of an important part of the episode.”

Lori Allen/NBC

Ruzek needed someone like Cook, who was calm, collected, and very focused throughout the episode, with him. “She rocked it, didn’t she? How good is she? She’s just a presence for days,” Flueger raves. “As both the actor and the character, I’m glad I had her as a partner in crime for that one. She rocked it. Her strength came through because he’s not a very good listener. He doesn’t like being told what to do. And so Toya coming in with her just strength and her solid nature, I think, made you believe that he’s going to listen to what she has to say.”

Before that moment on the curb, however, Ruzek had a close-quarters hand-to-hand fight with the father in a car following a crash to rescue the youngest son; he succeeded and got the kid out just before the car exploded.

“That was awkward,” Flueger recalls. “There was a child involved, so I was very concerned about bumping into him. [Ruzek’s] kind of running out of time. He’s got to get that little kiddo out of there, and he kind of makes some moves that I don’t think—it was kind of hard to do, only because we don’t put the gun away. We always clear weapons. We always make sure that the threat is taken care of before we do anything like that, but time was of the essence. So [it was] a little different as far as the moves that I made.”

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The nature of procedural dramas like Chicago P.D. is there’s not always time to linger on some storylines or losses, like the one Intelligence suffered with Martel’s death. While we had only seen her with the unit in one episode, she’d already been working with them for about a month when the season began and had history with Ruzek and Burgess (Marina Squerciati); because they’d been friends a long time, he couldn’t answer his fiancée’s call and deal with that in the middle of the manhunt. But the show is going to keep Martel’s memory alive, which Flueger was happy to see.

“Usually we kind of move on from storylines, but they’ve kind of serialized this, which is cool, where she kind of keeps coming back up and you see her photograph or there’s an episode—I think Episode 3—they’re passing around a bucket at the cop bar to make donations to her family and stuff like that,” he says. “So her memory is very much alive in the show, which is cool. We haven’t been able to do that a lot in the past. So I’m glad. And I think that’s a testament to Victoria who played Martel, just how likable much she jumped off the screen.”

What did you think of the latest episode? Let us know in the comments section below.

Chicago P.D., Wednesdays, 10/9c, NBC