FBI Post-Mortem: John Boyd on Playing the Duality of Joy and Grief in Scola's Unexpected Closure - Give Me My Remote : Give Me My Remote

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FBI Post-Mortem: John Boyd on Playing the Duality of Joy and Grief in Scola’s Unexpected Closure

January 28, 2025 by  

FBI Scola brother found

“Descent” – The suspected suicide of a former Assistant United States Attorney puts the team onto an airline whistleblower scandal. But when the investigation uncovers a sinister terrorist plot hacking the computer systems of airlines, they must race to stop planes falling out of the sky. Dealing with the memory of his brother, who was a victim of the 9/11, the case pushes Scola hard to prevent another catastrophe, on FBI, Tuesday, Jan. 28 (8:00-9:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network, and streaming on Paramount+ (live and on demand for Paramount+ with SHOWTIME subscribers, or on demand for Paramount+ Essential subscribers the day after the episode airs). Pictured (L-R): John Boyd as Special Agent Stuart Scola and Shantel VanSanten as Special Agent Nina Chase. Photo: Bennett Raglin/CBS ©2024 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Tuesday, January 28 episode of FBI.]

After delaying opening a letter on his desk for months, FBI’s Scola (John Boyd) finally worked up the courage to do it on the Tuesday, January 28 episode of the CBS drama—with an assist from his girlfriend, FBI: MOST WANTED’s Nina (Shantel VanSanten).

Scola asked Nina to read the letter in the final moments of “Descent”—and she obliged, narrating that the remains of Scola’s brother, Doug, had been discovered. (Doug was killed during the 9/11 attacks; Scola and Nina named their son, Dougie, after him.)

“I think the thing that I felt when we shot it was this connection to someone that’s gone,” Boyd tells Give Me My Remote in the video below. “Like, the way we feel when we feel the presence of someone that we love that we’ve lost and for this—to lose a brother, that’s somewhere in the rubble, that you never knew [where they were]…[it] was just a pile and you never got to find anything…to open a letter and then say, here he is. It’s almost like the person came into the room and is saying, ‘Here I am!’ And there’s this joy. It’s like a catharsis of grief at the same time there’s this clear joy of, ‘He was right there the whole time.’ And that’s really what I love about that scene, is getting to play both at the same time.”

It was also an important moment of vulnerability for the agent for him to ask his (life) partner to actually read the letter—and something that was important to Boyd, too.

“When [showrunner] Mike Weiss told me about the episode, kind of what the outline was, he didn’t mention anything about Nina,” Boyd recalls. “He just told me at the end of the episode [there is] this letter. And my mind thought, ‘Ugh, it would be so cool if they had Nina reading him the letter that he was afraid to open.’ And sure enough, I looked at the first draft and they’d done that. So it was so cool for that to line up.”

“We really explored the vulnerability of asking her to read it,” he continues. “That was the part of the scene that was actually more nuanced and difficult to play is to have to ask someone, ‘Will you help me? I need you right now.’ That was something that we found on the day.”

Boyd also praises the tense scene earlier in the hour where Scola tried to reason with one of their suspects, in an attempt to save passengers on hijacked commercial planes. “I think there was…nothing that he wouldn’t do—he was willing to go there to see her pain, to show his pain, to connect, to identify with each other in order, in order to ground those planes, in order to call off what she was doing,” he says. “And that made the scene so much more powerful for me, because it made them similar. It brought them to where they needed each other. We needed something from one another, and that’s what makes it compelling.”

In the aftermath of this hour, Boyd acknowledges this could be “just opening the door” to what’s next for Scola.

“This is just the beginning [of] a new relationship to the most significant tragedy of his life, losing his brother that way,” he points out. “I think that there’s a new type of grief. You know, there’s FBI chaplains that people have to go to talk to. There’s fellow agents that you need to talk to to discuss what’s happening. Because now you have details…there’s so many questions when we get an answer…Now there’s all these questions about what can you learn about his death? Where was he? What did you find? And how does he get closure for that? Is there a way—does he get to say goodbye? So it’ll be interesting to see how he leans on his colleagues, going forward.”

FBI, Tuesdays, 8/7c, CBS

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