WATSON Post-Mortem: Eve Harlow and Rochelle Aytes on the Fallout From Ingrid’s Lies and Past Connection to Mary

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Sunday, April 13 episode of WATSON.]

WATSON revealed more of Ingrid’s (Eve Harlow) backstory on the Sunday, April 13 episode, “Take a Family History”—including her secret tie to Mary (Rochelle Aytes).

In flashbacks, Ingrid’s sister, Gigi (Kiera Allen), desperately needed surgery to give her a chance to walk after what appeared to be a tragic accident. Though Mary was on board to help Gigi and Didi (as Ingrid was known when she was younger), she was overruled; Gigi was denied the treatment she needed. 

In the present time, Gigi—who was still unable to walk—had a medical crisis, which required bringing in the rest of Watson’s (Morris Chestnut) team. When Ingrid was forced to disclose her relationship with Gigi to Watson and Mary, and Mary’s role in Gigi’s past treatment, Ingrid was dealt a bittersweet blow: Gigi would continue to receive the treatment she was getting (despite the fact that Ingrid lied to get her a spot), but Ingrid would have two months to find another job.

How far Ingrid would go for her sister was also made clear in the hour. In flashbacks, Ingrid realized her father was why Gigi got hurt. In retaliation, Ingrid killed him.

“I was told immediately that this was Ingrid’s backstory,” Harlow tells Give Me My Remote in the video below. “The arc that I was given by [showrunner] Craig Sweeny and [executive producer] Larry Teng, I had a meeting like a day after I booked part…very early on, they were like, ‘Okay, we feel like this is pretty important. We should mention this is what happens…this is the arc that we see for you.’”

“The ending is very different than what they initially said, but the core of it—which is Ingrid killed her dad to protect her sister—stayed the same,” she continues. “And so I knew that the episode was coming up, and then I remember Craig texting me…I was, like, ‘This is the best gift ever.’ It was so fun…Getting a script like that and being like, ‘There’s so much there to work with.’”

Harlow was surprised by another element of the storytelling. “I didn’t know any of the Mary stuff, so the Mary stuff was a reveal when I read it,” she says. “But it was a really fun time. Which is weird to say…given how heavy the material is. But yeah.”

Aytes also learned about Mary’s past ties to Ingrid during production. “I learned about it when I opened the script and started reading it a week prior [to filming],” she says with a laugh. “And I was like, ‘Really? This is awesome.’ I was just excited to be able to play both myself in the present [and] in the past. And [for] Mary, something seems familiar, and she has these flashbacks, which you get to see, and when she realizes that Ingrid is Didi, everything comes back to her. You realize that she’s been holding this in for a long time.” 

“This has been, I’m sure, one of those cases that has weighed on her for years, because she cares,” she continues. “[We] get to see that Mary really cares about her patients, but she wasn’t in the position that she is in now to really make the decision to save her. She wanted to, but her boss [was] threatening her–which is very interesting, because now I’m the boss, and maybe I would have made different decisions back then. So having those two worlds come together, yeah, was just exciting and just so rewarding for me to get to play.”

Filming the confrontation between Ingrid and Mary in the present day, as the true extent of Ingrid’s pain and deception unraveled, took place over two days.

“It was so much fun—I cannot say enough good things about those [scenes],” Harlow enthuses. “You read a script like this, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I hope we get a good director. I hope we get somebody who gets it, and who I can talk to.] and that’s exactly what Mario [Van Peebles, who helmed the hour] was. He was very clear with how he was going to film, which was it was going to be over the span of two days; we were going to start further out, and then as the days progressed, we would just zoom more in.” 

“What’s great about that is that you have an opportunity to explore different ways of doing [the scene] and fine-tuning the performance every single time,” she continues. “So that when we do get to the close-up, you’re like, ‘Okay, I already know the scene and I get it.’ And there’s still room to explore, but being more and more comfortable with it.” 

The show’s sets also played into their production time. “It was very interesting, because we’ve got these windows so you can see [and] can [hear] sound through, and so we’re having this conversation, this heated moment, and the other characters are watching,” Aytes points out. “Which is why we had to film it for so long because there were different perspectives that you had to catch. And it was exhilarating. It was emotional. It was so powerful.”

The duo also relished going toe-to-toe in the emotional moments. “Rochelle is an amazing scene partner,” Harlow gushes. “Such a nice human and talented. We started working together, and she’s just giving it her all, every single time, [even when] the camera is not even on her… actors will hold a little bit back when the camera isn’t on them, which is completely understandable. It’s exhausting. It’s a lot to ask. Rochelle did not do that, ever. She was fully there. She gave me everything, which then, in turn, is inspiring my performance and how I’m delivering things because I’m reacting to what I’m being given. And I think to work with an actor like that is nothing short of a gift. I feel very lucky to have had all that stuff with her. And I tried to do the same when the camera was on her.”

“Eve, who is just an amazing actress, was right there with me and giving me so much of herself,” Aytes adds. “It was so powerful. I get goosebumps just thinking about those two days. It was like theater: Getting to really, find this character, find these moments, change up the moments, because we would do it so much. You can be big, and then you bring it in and you’re small. It was really one of my favorite two days, honestly, of shooting out of the whole thing. Eve and I, we worked so well together and she was right there for me at all times. I felt so safe and I was there for her. It was amazing.”

And the aftermath of that figurative explosion will be messy. “Obviously this is a monumental, life-changing moment,” Harlow acknowledges. ”It’s all the anger that she has kept for all of these years. Because I think she’s really furious at Mary; I think she’s kept that [inside] for all these years. The trauma, to a certain extent, it’s not going to go away until Gigi walks again—if she ever walks again. [And this is] the first time [she’s] capable of expressing this grief. You see in the flashbacks, when she walks past Mary and she doesn’t say anything as a teenager, and it’s like from that moment on, she’s like a fist that’s been clenched. And in this episode, what’s happening is that fist is opening and all this vile s— is coming out.”

“In my head, I’m picturing this, like, black, sticky gross stuff that she’s just been holding on,” she continues. “It’s coming out onto Mary, onto Watson, onto the walls around her. ‘I’ve had to carry this and f— you for that. I will never forgive you for not doing that surgery.’ Because it, again, has dictated the way she’s had to move through the world, the things she’s had to do. And it’s all because of that one moment, that one day, years back.”

But there’s still the lingering issue of her job—and the two months she has to find something else.

“[Ingrid] crossed that line, and someone warned [Mary] early on that she was dangerous, and so that’s playing in her head—narcissist, dangerous,” Aytes points out. “And then I see this happen, and she’s crossed the line where she’s got to go. However, there is a level of guilt that Mary has about her sister and not being able to save her, so she keeps [Gigi] in the trial. But she knows Ingrid has to go, and she gives her the two months instead of ‘Leave right now.’ Because she knows what she went through, what Ingrid went through, and she also knows how talented she is. She is a good doctor, and so she’s giving her a little bit of leeway. But just a little.”

Ingrid, however, may not take the dismissal easily. “I don’t think that Ingrid allows other people to push her into doing things that she doesn’t want to do,” Harlow says. “And I think that she finds ways of working around it…I think that that’s also what differentiates her from, like, a ‘normal person.’ I think that a normal person [would] be like, ‘Oh my God, I f— up. Yeah, I’m fired.’ And it’s just like, ‘No, I am in charge here. You don’t tell me what to do.’….so there might be a slight moment of, like, shock, of readjustment, but then the readjustment happens, and it’s like, ‘Oh, but this is what’s gonna happen. What I say will happen.’”

Moving forward, what happened with Gigi and Ingrid is “weighing on Mary.”  

“We don’t see too much of it in the episodes to come,” Aytes previews. “There’s not much talk about it, except in the final two episodes you’ll get to see her in that moment of having to make the final decision as to whether [Ingrid]’s going to stay or leave.”

But even that gets complicated. “There is a higher, more tragic problem at hand that may supersede this personal situation,” Aytes previews. “So she’s going to be struggling with the decisions that she made.”

RELATED:

• WATSON: ‘Take a Family History’ Photos
• WATSON: Eve Harlow and Rochelle Aytes Preview Ingrid’s Desperation to Save Her Sister and Mary Working with Watson’s Team
• WATSON: ‘A Variant of Unknown Significance’ Photos
• CBS Renews WATSON
• WATSON: ‘Teeth Marks’ Photos
• WATSON: ‘The Camgirl Inquiry’ Photos
• WATSON: ‘The Man with the Glowing Chest’ Photos
• WATSON: ‘Patient Question Mark’ Photos
• WATSON: ‘Wait for the Punchline’ Photos
• WATSON: ‘Redcoat’ Photos
• WATSON Post-Mortem: Craig Sweeny on the Moriarty Twist
• WATSON: CBS Sets Post-AFC Championship Game Launch for Series Premiere
• CBS Orders WATSON to Series

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