GHOSTS Post-Mortem: Richie Moriarty Breaks Down the ‘Pete’s Wife’ Reveals

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Thursday, November 4 episode of GHOSTS.]

GHOSTS’ Pete (Richie Moriarty) got to reunite with his wife, Carol (Caroline Aaron) on the Thursday, November 4 episode, “Pete’s Wife”…only to discover not only had she married his best friend, but their relationship started prior to his death.

Though Pete, understandably, got livid, he eventually found peace with it…especially after he saw his daughter, Laura (Holly Gautier-Frankel) and discovered she had her own son, whom she named Pete.

It was a lot of progress for a man who had been stuck in relative limbo for the past forty years. So what comes next? Moriarty shared a bit of insight into how this might change the Pete viewers have come to know…

Pete now knows his wife cheated on him…with his best friend. How does this knowledge impact him going forward?
You know, it’s going to impact things. Especially because it’s with his best friend. So it’s like kind of this double betrayal of his friend and his wife did this thing to him. And I think it’s impossible for that not to impact things.

He’s in an interesting situation where he has to digest this information and move on pretty quickly, because they’re not going to be there for long; they’re there for a quick visit. So he goes through this huge, emotional spectrum in their visit there, because he’s obviously furious to learn that they were having a relationship with each other while he was still alive. But then his wife has this sweet moment of an apology. And, unbeknownst to her, he’s there and kind of receiving her kind words and her basically asking for forgiveness. And I think he pretty quickly finds himself ready to maybe not fully forgive, but he understands where she’s coming from.

He understands that she made a mistake, and he understands that she has lived 40 years without him now. He very quickly realizes, look, I love both of these people. I love my best friend, Jerry. I love my wife, Carol. And if they ended up together, then…you kind of have to be okay with that. You want them both to be happy, despite what they’ve done to you.

Pete is a really optimistic guy, and even through betrayal, be able to look on the bright side, and wish the best for these people that meant the world to him, you know?

The episode also saw Pete reuniting with his now-grown daughter…and her son, Pete. How was it filming that moment of discovery for him?
I think it means everything to him. I have two little kids, and to think about not being a part of their adult life, as long as I hope I will be, is heartbreaking. And to meet his grandson, who is named after him, really touches him. It speaks to how his daughter remembers him and wants his legacy to live on.

I think, to some degree, we’re all concerned about legacy; we want to be leaving the world in a better place. But we also want to be remembered by the people we love the most. And what better to say that you’re remembered than having a child named after you? That’s incredibly impactful for Pete.

As a performer performing that scene, and just connecting with that idea, we moved to Montreal for four months to shoot this this season. And I had a one-month-old daughter; I had a brand new baby that was coming up with us. I feel like any new parent is already like emotionally raw, mostly from lack of sleep or otherwise, but it was very easy to kind of tap into the emotion of what that would feel like to be seeing your daughter after all of these years. And know that she’s in a good place and she has this beautiful little boy who has your name. I think it was pretty easy for me to kind of connect emotionally with that, with a new baby at home, and just this idea of legacy and how you want your family to feel about you after you move on.

After an experience like this, how much can Pete truly change who we’ve gotten to know these first few episodes? Are you feeling like you’re playing him differently?
Yeah, it’s funny, he has these moments of closure. He also, for the first time, really, shows like really intense anger around this situation which the audience had not seen for Pete.

And this kind of episode is such a gift to an actor, because you’re able to show a lot of dimensions to a character that the audience has not seen yet, especially this early on in the first season of a brand new show to American audiences. It’s such a gift to be able to show many sides, and it’s definitely it feels like it has freed me up in future episodes after we shot this episode to show different sides of Pete.

The ghosts have now seen him in a new light. He has gone through this situation where he has very much seen himself as a married man this whole time. For 40 years, he’s been dead. He wears his wedding ring every day. And he thinks, I’m still married, my wife is still living, and I’m still very much committed to her.

But I think this moment, and this episode, kind of provides him with a new lens to be like, You know what I am, if I’m going to be here for eternity in this house, maybe I can explore what it feels like to not be committed to somebody and to be a single ghost. That’s something audiences can look forward to. It is going to change his perspective a bit.

What does Pete as a single ghost look like?
Oh, man, I wish I could tell you so much. I will just say that Pete explores more than one relationship over the course of the season. [Laughs.] He’s very open to being engaged with other people or ghosts.

Is he focusing more on the ghosts or living women?
I think Pete wants like a real connection and the only real kind of connection you can have is with people who’ve already passed.

Another tease is to say that the wonderful thing about this universe that the showrunners have created is that there will be other ghosts. It’s not limited to just the people that we’re meeting in these first few episodes. We will meet other ghosts, in the course of this first season, and I think any new ghosts you meet is a new opportunity for relationships with everyone in the house.

This season is so rich, and it’s so fun. We had the episode with Thor and his whole funeral, to dig into his backstory. Pete has his moment in this episode. And as we go on, we’ve learned so much more about all of the ghosts. And they they change from being you know, relatively one dimensional in the first few episodes, where we’re just introducing these characters, to much richer characters with a whole life that audiences are not aware of yet. So it’s been so fun to build out these characters and get to play these characters and then get to explore what it means when we’ve learned about their other sides.

We have like incredible moments with Rebecca Wisocky’s character, Danielle Pinnock’s character, Sheila Carrasco’s character flower. I think probably the thing I’m most excited about is for audiences to see how gifted these actors are on the show. It’s been such a pleasure and an acting course to be on set every day. Because we just have the most fascinating group of people who are portraying these ghosts. And to have Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar at the head of this show—talk about pros. I just feel so insanely lucky. We are surrounded by the kindest people, who are just so insanely talented, and I think audiences are going to see so much more from everybody on the show. It’s really going to be such a fun season.

GHOSTS, Thursdays, 9/8c, CBS

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• GHOSTS’ Richie Moriarty on Meeting a Mini-Pete on Halloween, Plus Pete’s Upcoming Family ‘Reunion’
• CBS Orders Full Season of GHOSTS
• GHOSTS: What You Need to Know About the Series Premiere

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