Will this be the year that Callen (Chris O’Donnell) finally learns the truth about his family on NCIS: Los Angeles? And if so, what price will he have to pay?
Season 7 kicks off with a small time jump, picking up three months after the end of Season 6, when viewers learned that Callen’s presumed-dead father is actually alive. And it’s only a matter of time before Callen makes the same discovery. “The very heart of what this show is is Callen’s search for his family,” executive producer Shane Brennan tells TVGuide.com. “We are stepping closer and closer to finally giving Callen closure.”
The premiere finds Callen butting heads with the rest of the team after someone from his past (whom we’ve met before) returns with a piece of information that Callen is “hell-bent” on looking into, Brennan says.
“Callen goes a little rogue,” Brennan tells TVGuide.com. “It puts him in a fairly difficult position with Hetty. It puts him in a very, very difficult position with Sam – and as a result, puts him in a difficult position with the rest of the team. We’ve never seen Sam or Hetty in this position with Callen before. We’ve had situations where he’s gone off the grid, but there’s some pretty interesting conversations between Callen and Hetty and Callen and Sam about loyalty and being informed about what’s happening.”
Callen puts the “G.” in “OMG” when NCIS: Los Angeles opens Season 7, as seen in these exclusive photos from the CBS drama’s Monday, Sept. 21 premiere.
Picking up three months after the finale, in which Hetty (played by Linda Hunt) informed/fibbed to Callen (Chris O’Donnell) that his father was dead, “We discover that Callen has been doing his own investigation into something,” showrunner Shane Brennan tells TVLine. And as a result of his rogue op, “He finds himself in a very difficult situation with Hetty and Sam (LL Cool J), because he’s not telling them what he’s got himself caught up in.”
Brennan says that although Callen’s agenda is ultimately revealed in the premiere (titled “Active Measures),” “It’s not resolved.” Rather, “In the tradition of this show, we plant the seeds of something to come, and it has a fairly major impact halfway through the season, in a double-episode.”
Onetime Jericho resident Alicia Coppola is heading back to NCIS: Los Angeles, to reprise her role as FBI Agent Lisa Rand, TVLine has learned exclusively.
Coppola first played Rand in the Season 2 episode “Little Angels,” in which the teenage daughter of a U.S. Navy Commander was kidnapped by what appeared to be a serial killer.
Her encore on the CBS drama will air sometime this spring.
Coppola’s other previous TV credits include NCIS and its sire JAG (as Lt. Cmdr. Faith Coleman), as well as American Dreams, The Nine Lives of Chloe King, Common Law and, most recently, episodes of Criminal Minds and Sons of Anarchy.
NCIS: Los Angeles resumes its sixth season on Monday at 10/9c.
Are Kensi (Daniela Ruah) and Deeks (Eric Christian Olsen) moving too fast on NCIS: Los Angeles?
Since agreeing to go all-in with their relationship a few episodes ago, the couple have been moving full speed ahead – but a “post-wakeup argument” on Monday’s episode leaves Kensi perhaps wanting to put the brakes on.
“They wake up together and they’re super cuddly, and on a turn of a dime she gets really offended about something and he doesn’t know where it came from,” Ruah told TVGuide.com during a recent set visit. “I think it’s really well-written in the sense that I understood both parts. It’s one of those arguments where the stereotype man and the stereotype woman are in completely different playing fields in what they’re talking about. In this case, Kensi is kind of offended about something that he says. And to him it’s like, ‘Why would you ever be offended by that? It’s really no big deal. … You were just kissing the back of my neck. How did we get here right now?'”
Unfortunately, that’s not the only fight they’ll deal with in Monday’s episode. A work-related crisis forces Densi to table their argument to deal with more pressing matters. In a callback to the Season 5 episode “Frozen Lake,” the episode marks the return of the Nepalese Gurkha Thapa (Ernie Reyes Jr.), who the crew enlists for help after Sam (LL Cool J) is shot while trying to apprehend a spy. But, in the course of their investigation, Thapa and the NCIS team begin to suspect that his own country may be working against him. which leads to Deeks and Kensi squaring off with a slew of knife-fighters in a hospital corridor.
“It’s kind of a race to find the truth in the midst of trying to keep Sam alive, and trying to keep Kensi alive, and trying to navigate a relationship,” Olsen notes. “It doesn’t stop.”
Ruah worked with the episode’s writer, Dave Kalstein, to choreograph the hospital fight scene based on martial arts and the Filipino knife-fighting technique known as Sayoc Kali. “I’m very meticulous when it comes to fight scenes,” she says. “It’s one of my favorite things to do on the show. And I do have a dance background, so I think of everything as a choreography with beats. … My body knows the dance alphabet. So when they tell me to spell a certain word, I know how to do that. Even though it’s a fight versus a dance.”
So how does this particular fight scene stack up against other ones Ruah has performed on the show? “In terms of moves, I think this is probably the hardest that I’ve done,” she says. “Because it’s also a very specific type of fighting. It’s not like you’re just throwing punches or something like that. It’s a specific type of fighting and you want to be as faithful as you can to the technique of it. I’m not perfect or anything like that. And then there’s also the fact that I just want to look tough.”
For Deeks, who at one point finds himself on the other side of a hospital door, watching Kensi and Thapa tussle with the other Gurkhas, it’s a new dynamic. “The stakes are so much higher because of the fact that he’s in love with her,” Olsen says. “So, it’s that delicate balance of trying to stay alive while trying to do justice to that love.”
Check out an exclusive clip of Monday’s episode here.
NCIS: LA airs Mondays at 10/9c on CBS.
Now that Kensi Blye (Daniela Ruah) and Marty Deeks (Eric Christian Olsen) have decided to take the plunge into a full-fledged relationship onNCIS: Los Angeles, the next step is navigating the waters. And perhaps the most important question is this: What impact will their coupling have on their approach to cases?
“Everybody’s kind of waiting to see if our work is jeopardized by the success of the relationship,” Olsen told TVGuide.com during a recent set visit. “Now you have two characters that are obviously meant to be together, together under the most dynamic and terrifying of circumstances. When things go wrong, is it going to be the fault of that relationship?
“We make decisions based on being a good agent,” Olsen continues. “We make decisions based on what’s in the best interest of the country or the mission, and everything kind of flies out the window when you become so emotionally invested in your partner. … Now [Deeks] has this realization that [Kensi] is the most important person in the world to him. And I think it’s going to be the catalyst for a lot of mistakes.”
Other complications arise from the couple’s reluctance to share the news with their colleagues – who, let’s face it, have their suspicions already. “I think eventually the team’s going to have to know what’s going on between Kensi and Deeks,” Ruah tells TVGuide.com. “I don’t think it’ll be a surprise for any one of the other characters, especially not Hetty. I think she could see it coming a mile away.”
In exploring a new side of Kensi, Ruah says she drew from her own experience with her now-husband, David Olsen (Eric’s older brother, who sometimes acts as a stand-in on the set of NCIS: LA.) “I went through a similar situation when my husband and I started dating,” she admits. “There was this, we’re not ready to tell people yet. We’re not ready to make this a thing for other people to deal with. And then eventually you get comfortable.
“Very few people manage to hold a balance when something so big transitions in your life. … A part of me feels like she’s going to be better at hiding it than him,” Ruah says of her character. “I think she’ll almost go the opposite side of the pendulum. Instead of giggling and whatever when nobody’s looking, I think she’s probably going to almost keep her distance more. … My husband would talk to me less on set when we started dating than he did before we were dating. It was like, ‘I’m going to be so pretending this is not going on that I’m going to ignore you completely, instead of being normal around you.’ I think people react in different ways.”
Despite the fact that NCIS: LA has moved to 10 p.m. this season, fans shouldn’t expect a lot of hot and heavy Densi scenes. This is, after all, still a police procedural.
“They have to keep it serious and professional at work,” Ruah notes. “There’s not a great, if any, distinction in the scenes that we did prior to dating officially to post-dating officially. Their professionalism and their banter and their looks are pretty much similar or the same. It’s just in these little wonderful tidbits that the writers drop for us, such as scenes where they find themselves alone or on a date or whatever it is.”
And of course, it won’t all be smooth sailing from here on out. Future episodes will explore “navigating a relationship with just the lack of communication skills these two characters have, and their struggle to kind of make anything work,” Olsen teases. That includes (spoiler alert) the couple’s first argument, in the episode airing Feb. 23.
But even Olsen and Ruah admit they’re not certain about where the relationship is heading.
“I don’t get the scripts until a couple weeks before you guys see them on TV, so I’m just as emotionally invested in this relationship and where it’s going as the audience is,” Olsen admits. “Will they, won’t they –I thought that would go on for 10 seasons. So, when they decided to pull the trigger, the thing everybody else felt watching the show is the same thing I felt reading the show. Like, oh my god, now what? … All the questions as an audience, they’re asking, I’m asking the same questions.”
Adds Ruah: “It was a surprise to me when they wrote that Kensi had that conversation in the Christmas episode with Deeks. I didn’t think it was going to happen for a while, so much so that in interviews they kept asking us, ‘What would you like to see happen?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I don’t think they should get together yet, otherwise there’s nowhere to go.’ … And then all of a sudden, they threw us this curveball. I’m very curious to see where they’re going to take this and what obstacles they’re going to throw in our way, because they have to. They have to throw some sort of obstacle, because it can’t just be smooth from now on. It can’t. … Even I’m excited to see where this is going to go.”
NCIS: LA airs Mondays at 10/9c on CBS.
Now that Kensi and Deeks are all coupled up on NCIS: Los Angeles, it looks like Cupid has set his sights on Callen.
In fact, Callen (Chris O’Donnell) is going to get more than a little cozy with Joelle (Elizabeth Bogush), who recently hinted that she’d like to be a part of Callen’s life. “I think it’s good for him,” O’Donnell told TVGuide.com when we visited the set. “Callen needs a little love in his life.”
However, they’ll have to navigate some serious trust issues along the way. After all, Callen did lie to her about what he does for a living. “He doesn’t let a lot of people into his life,” O’Donnell says. “He’s so insecure about that. He doesn’t know anything about his real life.”
But Callen may have reason to be cautious. Let’s not forget that executive producer Shane Brennan teased at the start of Season 6 that Callen’s new love interest would have a mysterious connection to his past. “[It] ends up being connected to someone that we’ve seen in several past episodes,” O’Donnell says. “There’s more to the story.”
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Season Ten
Date: Sundays (9:00, ET/PT) CBS
Status: Filming
Photos | IMDB | Official Site | Itunes
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