SCANDAL Stars Tease ‘A Criminal, A Whore, An Idiot and a Liar’

Fitz may have just woken up from his coma on SCANDAL (darn assassination attempts ruin everything!), but a good portion of the insight viewers will get from tonight’s brand new episode comes from flashbacks.

“Each flashback episode is like a goldmine for us,” Tony Goldwyn (Fitz) told me when I hit up the set as part of ABC’s winter press tour day. “As an actor, you make all kinds of assumptions, and [SCANDAL creator] Shonda [Rhimes] and I talked early on about what the backstory was. But when we get it in things like [tonight]’s show with my father, I made assumptions [before that] — some of which were correct. It’s a gift. It’s like reading chapters of your own biography, but after playing the character for a year. It’s really fun.”

As for what we’ll see this time around in flashbacks, much of the focus is on Fitz’s complicated relationship with his father.

“We will meet Fitz’s father in a flashback, in an episode that will be a mirror in some ways to last year’s flashback to the campaign trail,” Goldwyn said. “This is further along in the process of building up to the election itself. Fitz has a very complicated relationship with his dad. And we also will get deeper into Fitz and Olivia’s relationship…Fitz will be instrumental — in as much as he’s suffering and as debilitated as he is, he will be instrumental in saving Mellie from her own boldness.”

And what will everyone else be up to?

“The viewers get a glimpse of Abby pre-Olivia Pope and Associates,” Darby Stanchfield (Abby) teased. “You get a bit more of the flavor of what she’s like before she became a pro-investigator. She’s very different. Note the nail polish.”

But the most intense scene of the episode may be a pivotal moment between Cyrus and Olivia.

“Olivia and I come to a moral and philosophical [crossroad] on how to win this election,” Jeff Perry (Cyrus) explained. “Of how to get Fitz elected. And it’s kind of the first — and in another sense, it’s Olivia going from another idealism…to realism about Washington and how things do or don’t get done. It’s pretty fundamental. And it pushes us, it really pushes us to the brink with each other, as people who really love each other.”

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SCANDAL airs Thursdays at 10 PM on ABC.

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