‘The Rookie’: Melissa O’Neil Teases Something Very Different Coming for Lucy
What To Know
- Melissa O’Neil calls Lucy’s The Rookie Season 8 “a rollercoaster.”
- O’Neil also teases what to expect from the “blockbuster” finale.
You’re not going to want to miss a moment of what’s still to come in The Rookie Season 8.
It’s already been somewhat of a wild ride for Lucy (Melissa O’Neil). She’s been promoted to roving supervisor, revisited her own Season 2 trauma, pushed for and successfully completed a weeks-long undercover operation in Mexico, alongside Nyla (Mekia Cox), got back together and moved in with Tim (Eric Winter), and met his mom. But it sounds like this is just the beginning, as O’Neil told TV Insider, “Lucy goes through an absolute rollercoaster this season, especially in the first half, but it kind of reaches this apex crescendo around midseason.”
She continued, “It’s pretty divergent from anything that we’ve seen Lucy go through in the eight years that we’ve been following her journey. It was just a wonderful exercise, especially because when you do a show and you move with a character for as long as you do, even though the circumstances are kind of different, you generally know how you might behave, how your character might deal with the situation. And this was totally foreign territory.”
O’Neil also praised the writers for how they handle the fact that The Rookie characters deal with “life-altering material” but then return to work like nothing happened. Rather than completely forget about some of those events, she noted that there could be “payoff” years later, like Lucy talking about what happened to her six years ago earlier this season.
The star also pointed out, “That kind of mimics the reality of working in law enforcement. It’s like you might have a terrible day, but you still need to come to work and deal with everything and you need to check your bulls**t at the door because nobody really wants to deal with your bad attitude. Yes, you had a bad time, but come on, we got stuff to do that demands your attention now, not this other stuff you’re dealing with. So I appreciate that there’s, intentional or not, a sweet reflection of the reality of this job inside of the format of how we tell the stories on our show.”
We’re only eight episodes into Season 8, but the cast has already wrapped filming. And so when we spoke with O’Neil, we were able to get some teases about how it ends.
“The finale feels like a blockbuster film. I don’t know how else to say it. We were on a location that was epic to be on, and there were two units at one point, myself and my acting partner were moving back and forth between two units six different times in the span of, I think, three hours or something like that, doing things that our show has absolutely never done before,” she previewed. “And it’s a real credit to the capability of our team to be so flexible and able to maneuver in such crazy situations. That kind of blew my mind, but all hands will be on deck for the finale situation.”
As for how she wants fans to feel at the end, “I want them to feel like they just got off the most terrifying rollercoaster: Adrenaline should be pumping, you should be catching your breath a little bit and just a little bit afraid.” And hopefully ready to get back on and do it again for a Season 9. (The series has yet to be renewed.) “Here’s hoping,” O’Neil agrees.
What are you hoping to see in the rest of The Rookie Season 8? Let us know in the comments section below.
The Rookie, Mondays, 10/9c, ABC
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