FBI‘s Missy Peregrym broke her silence after the hit CBS series took a turn with a shocking onscreen death.
During the Monday, March 16, episode of FBI, Maggie (Peregrym) had to face off with her first arrest — serial slasher Ray DiStefano (Matthew Rauch) — who kidnapped her sister, Erin (Adrienne Rose Bengtsson). Maggie ultimately wasn’t able to save her sister, whose body she found after thinking she would still be alive.
“I was scared to do this script. I was scared to play this part, knowing what a dark place I would have to go to to just live in that moment, and I really cared that if I had to go that far that we did this as grounded and real and scary as possible,” Peregrym told TV Insider about the surprise twist. “And so it was amazing to work with [the writers] to figure out, what would be the most heartbreaking thing? Originally, it was written where there was a little bit more of a wrap-up with Peter in the episode. And I just felt like, ‘Ugh, how could you even talk after discovering your sister?’”
Peregrym opened up about her concerns going into the episode.
“I just kind of went to work and I was like, ‘OK, I know what I have to do today, but I don’t know how I’m going to do this. I know where I need to go, but I don’t know what my body’s going to do,’” she recalled. “And we did it in one take. … But I didn’t look at Erin beforehand. I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want to know what I was — I didn’t know anything. And so when I turn that corner and go into the truck, that was the first time I was experiencing that moment, and it was hell.”
The actress explained why it was “really important” to tell the story, adding, “Everybody’s lost somebody, we’re experiencing this a lot. It’s obviously not going to be the same scenario, but that grief and that fear and that, oh, it’s the worst feeling in the whole world. And I didn’t want it to wrap up. I didn’t want it to feel OK in the end. It makes me cry thinking about it now because it’s real.”
FBI, which premiered in 2018, centers on the inner workings of the New York City field office criminal division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where the personnel work to ensure the safety of New York City and its citizens.
“We’re a procedural show, so we don’t get to go this deep into the character, and I’m really grateful to the writers for trusting me with this episode in the moment, as scared as I was to do it. And I’m grateful — I haven’t seen it,” Peregrym continued. “I’m grateful that it’s turned out well, but my hope is that people can really relate to Maggie in the next chapter of having to get back up and how does she make sense of her world now after this gigantic loss, not even just with Erin, but with her career? How can she trust herself to move forward and be herself and be vulnerable or do her job without feeling that anybody she loves or herself is not going to be threatened again?”
Peregrym admitted she “didn’t ask why” Erin “didn’t survive.”
“I can’t go to a worse place for my character,” she noted. “So, kind of grateful for that. Hopefully things are looking up from here.”
Looking ahead, Peregrym made it clear that the personal loss would stay with her character.
“We do address that, obviously, and it’s still stuff that I carry with me. I’ll never be the same to a certain degree. Never. I’ll never be the same. Which again was why I was so scared to go this far with my character,” she continued. “Playing something for eight years and then all of a sudden having a loss like this, you don’t ever go back to the person you were before. You’ve got to navigate a completely different set of, I don’t even know, rules, set of understanding, trying to figure out where your place is anymore. What can you trust? And it’s terrifying.”
Peregrym concluded: “We’re not a character show where we sit around in our living room and chat about everything. I’m choosing to come to work because there’s work to do. So, it’s finding those moments to have those discussions and figure those things out, but we still have cases to solve.”
FBI airs on CBS Mondays at 9 p.m. ET.
