CHICAGO P.D.: LaRoyce Hawkins Previews Atwater’s Unlikely Team-Up with His Father in ‘The Bleed Valve’

CHICAGO P.D.’s Atwater (LaRoyce Hawkins) had a surprise reunion with his father, Lew (Erik LaRay Harvey) earlier this year, but things have been shaky between the two men after years of estrangement. (Lew was imprisoned and didn’t want his family to see him.)

“I think Atwater still desires to trust his dad more, desires to communicate differently,” Hawkins tells Give Me My Remote in the video below. “But they’re not there yet. Just being honest—they’re not there yet.”

However, Atwater’s hands will be forced a bit when there’s a shooting at the building he owns in Burnside on the Wednesday, May 3 episode, “The Bleed Valve.”

“What we should understand about Atwater is that right now he’s a little spread thin,” Hawkins notes. “He doesn’t have that much help, at least in his head, as far as his building is concerned. He’s doing a lot on his own. To the point where he’s even doing soft repairs and maintenance in his building. His dad is offering help, but he’s not exactly sure how to feel about that or if he can trust his Pops with that kind of responsibility. So he takes it all on. He takes it all on his own.”

“And we see what happens when you put too much on yourself, right?” he continues. “[What happens when] you don’t allow yourself either to rest or to delegate the responsibilities elsewhere. So something tragic happens in his own building, and he’s forced to carry the weight that he put on himself prior to the moment, plus the extra weight of trying to figure the moment out. And I think at this point is where he realizes he’s going to need a little help and he’s going to have to trust somebody else—that may or may not be his dad.”

But allowing that complicated relationship to touch his work life, where he’s formed his own quasi-family unit, comes with its own headaches.

“I think he did his best to avoid it,” Hawkins says. “We saw what happened last time Atwater’s dad got involved in the case—Atwater didn’t really handle it the best. And so I think we see Atwater doing his best to avoid it, but when he can’t avoid it, I think we see him do his best to kind of control it, and be on top of it and be assertive, [with] how he navigates it with his dad.”

“But there are these moments of miscommunication and missed communication that they both have to overcome in order to find a balance,” he continues. “I think they share the same interest, as far as wanting to save the life of a young man who could be going down a dark road. I think it’s important for both of them to solve the case, and get justice for the families involved. But they don’t communicate well enough to be on the same page.”

Though Hawkins has played Atwater for over a decade, the episode allowed the actor to find unexpected insight into his character—and humanity as a whole. “We find Atwater really having to do his best and having to be humble…I think what I learned more than anything in this episode is that humans make heroes and not the other way around,” he says. “And I almost went down a dark hole as I was preparing nightly for these days of work. And I realized that I really have to embrace Atwater’s imperfections in this moment, and allow the audience to relate to a human. You know, we don’t always relate to perfection over righteousness.”

“So we watch Atwater and his dad have very human exchanges and experiences with each other,” he continues. “And then we watched them grow into heroes based on the adversity that episode provides. And, to me, that’s an authentic journey to watch. And that was our goal. We just wanted to just create something real and relatable for fathers and sons to pick up on, for families to notice themselves in.”

CHICAGO P.D., Wednesdays, 10/9c, NBC

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