GHOSTS Post-Mortem: Román Zaragoza on Sass’ Secret

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Thursday, October 20 episode of GHOSTS, “The Tree.”]

GHOSTS’ Sam (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) fought very hard to save an old tree on their property on the Thursday, October 20 episode, “The Tree”—unaware it wasn’t exactly what they thought it was.

When the duo and the ghosts found out their neighbors were looking to have the tree removed, Sasappis (Román Zaragoza) freaked out, telling Sam it needed to be saved: it had special meaning to his people, and the marks represented the 13 dialects of the Lenape language.

Sam wrote an op-ed defending the right for the tree to stay standing, which inspired a protest. But when a local Lenape man told Sam her story could not be right, Sass was forced to admit the truth—it was actually his tribute to Shiki. (He made a mark on it every time she said, “Hi.”)

As he was reading the script, “I definitely had a sense that it was going to go somewhere different, but I was not expecting it to go where it went,” Zaragoza admits to Give Me My Remote. “It became something that most people would think is kind of trivial and not important, but I do love the fact that Sass held so much importance to these markings that he made about this woman that he loved.”

“He wanted to hold on to that for as long as he could, because he didn’t have anything else physical left from his time period,” he continues. “His people aren’t there, they’re all pushed out, and this tree was the one thing left. [There’s] something so beautiful of him wanting to hold on to it.”

Though his fellow ghosts (and Jay) had some fun with Sass’ disclosure about what the tree meant, Zaragoza is delighted about this new layer to play

“I’m not gonna lie: This episode really taught me a lot about Sasappis,” he says. “And I love that about TV: how every every episode that we get, we are just cracking away at these characters. I’m from theater, where we know beginning to end of the script, and we can make our choices. This is a little bit more like we’re finding things out as we go and it’s exciting. It keeps me on my toes. And I’m very, very grateful that we get to see this side of Sass.”

“He’s sensitive, and he’s insecure,” he continues. “He’s shy. We see this vulnerable side of him. I’m just really excited for people to see that the other side, rather than just the sarcastic, pessimistic guy. We see who he was when he was alive.”

Given the fallout for Sam and Jay (who faced cancellations and protests at their B&B, as well as lingering tension with the neighbors), does Sass feel at all guilty? “I think he definitely feels some guilt,” Zaragoza acknowledges. “And I think he also values that he’s a good storyteller. [His thought is,] ‘I am going to lie my way out of this, because my goal is bigger than my conscious. I really want to save this tree, and I will do whatever I can to accomplish that.'”

Now that his soft heart is a little more out in the open, “we’re seeing a lot more of this side of Sasappis, which is really fun,” Zaragoza says. “I feel like as we’ve opened up who he was and who he is and how he handles love and how he navigates relationships, we just see more of this from him. And I’m really excited that our amazing writers, led by Joe Port and Joe Wiseman, have really given me this gifts of Sass’ vulnerable and sensitive side. How he puts on this exterior of being the wise man or the sarcastic guy who’s over it, but he actually cares very deeply. He is insecure and really just trying to figure out very simple relationship things.”

GHOSTS, Thursdays, 8:30/7:30c, CBS

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