FBI: MOST WANTED Post-Mortem: Edwin Hodge on Ray and Ray Sr.’s Heart-to-Heart and Progress with Cora

February 21, 2024 by Marisa Roffman

“Footsteps” – The Fugitive Task Force launches into full gear after multiple bombings appear to be targeting retired NYPD officers. Also, Ray decides he’s ready to take the next step in his relationship with Cora, on FBI: MOST WANTED, Tuesday, Feb. 20 (10:00-11:00 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): Edwin Hodge as Special Agent Ray Cannon, Steven Williams as Ray Cannon Sr., Roxy Sternberg as Special Agent Sheryll Barnes, and Dylan McDermott as Supervisory Special Agent Remy Scott. Photo: Mark Schafer/CBS ©2023 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Tuesday, February 20 episode of FBI: MOST WANTED.]

FBI: MOST WANTED’s Ray (Edwin Hodge) had to contend with his father, Ray Sr. (Steven Williams), getting wrapped up in a case on the Tuesday, February 20 hour, “Footsteps,” though—thankfully—both men were able to get out of the hour unscathed.

The Fugitive Task Force came to Sr. when it became clear a father-daughter duo was targeting law enforcement officials who kept them apart…and tortured the father, who was a suspected terrorist. Though Ray Sr. didn’t participate, he knew what was going on, including the fact they played a tape that implied the man’s daughter had been taken by the CIA.

Though the duo targeted Ray Sr. for revenge with a bomb, Remy talked the daughter down while Ray gave his father back-up while Ray Sr. apologized for what happened to the father.

“Our tactics were immoral,” Ray Sr. said, while acknowledging he didn’t know about the tape that would be played. “And our leaders made choices for us which were indefensible. And here we are, 20 years later, and we’re dragging our own children into the mess that we made.”

It was enough to prompt the man to turn himself in, which convinced his daughter to stand down, too, leading to the FTF arresting them both.

Later, Ray asked his father why he never told him about the case; Ray Sr. admitted he wanted his son to be proud of him. And while Ray Sr. admitted he couldn’t have stopped the torture he witnessed, he lamented that he didn’t do more—quit, blow the whistle, something.

“But I couldn’t find the courage to stand up for what I believe,” Ray Sr. said. His son tried to comfort him, but Ray Sr. was firm “You’ve got to try to live your life with no regrets. I’m not just talking about the job.” The duo ended their chat with a lighter moment, as Ray Sr. encouraged Ray to not let Cora (Caroline Harris) go if he was sure about her.

“That last scene with he and I at the table, that was one of those things where it’s just, do what you do,” Hodge tells Give Me My Remote with a laugh. “And he brought it. He brings this lightness, but also this intensity. It does mirror Ray in this episode. I don’t know why, but for some reason, it’s like the first time I’d actually seen Ray smile, a big smile, at the very, very end. And it was like, ‘We need more of that. We need more of Ray’s smiles, because not everything is about the job.’ We’re doing a great job of creating that nice firm balance. And Steven, he’s gonna be an intricate part of that.”

As for how Ray Sr.’s warning about regrets might influence his son, Hodge was a little more cautious about it actually playing out in an obvious way. “It’s all about taking that moment to just think,” he explained. “I think in life, we all move in a way that’s protective. We want to protect ourselves. We want to protect our feelings, emotions, protect the people around us. And a lot of times, in doing that, we actually hurt ourselves and we hurt the people around us. We become a shell of ourselves. We don’t speak or talk [about] our feelings or anything of that nature.”

“So, for me, it’s all about that core, the development,” he continues. ”I feel like my father is going to come in and really kind of dictate Ray’s next moves…we move in a way that just sometimes just doesn’t benefit us. And how do we get out of our headspace to open ourselves up to new people, new ideas, new emotions, new interactions, and connections? But there’s a balance. And I think we all have to find a way that it works for us.”

For Ray, Hodge says, it means “really having a defined balance of what his personal life means to him and what his job means to him. There’s going to be sacrifices. It’s going to be sacrificing of self. It’s going to be a sacrifice of life, maybe; not your own, somebody else’s. And how do we deal with that pain? How do we deal with trauma? How do we deal with happiness and joy? I think we touch on all of that. And, Ray, his journey will encompass all of that.”

“Footsteps” – The Fugitive Task Force launches into full gear after multiple bombings appear to be targeting retired NYPD officers. Also, Ray decides he’s ready to take the next step in his relationship with Cora, on FBI: MOST WANTED, Tuesday, Feb. 20 (10:00-11:00 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): Edwin Hodge as Special Agent Ray Cannon and Steven Williams as Ray Cannon Sr. Photo: Mark Schafer/CBS ©2023 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

One element of Ray’s life that might be looking up? Cora admitted she was all in on their relationship…and he officially introduced her (and her son) to his father.

“You know, that’s always the next step: Meet the lady, fall in love, meet the parents, get married,” Hodge says of the family get-together. “At least that’s the way it probably should be. But with Ray, we get to find this lightness in him; Cora, she is that. I think she is the unexpected joy that he did not did not see coming.”

“I think a lot of what Ray did was to show his father, ‘Hey, I can do this s—, too. Look what you taught me; I could be a great field agent, too,’” he continues. “But at the same time, he’s human, he is going to make mistakes. Cora may go through something in her personal life that’s outside of Ray. And how does Ray step up to support her? It’s all the little things that really build these stories. He’s obviously stepping up with her kid and trying to make sure that he’s a positive father figure in his life—although he kills people for a living.”

This MOST WANTED hour isn’t the only important event for Hodge this month. He also has a film, PARALLEL, which is being released in theaters (on February 23 and On Demand on February 27) that he co-stars in and co-wrote alongside Aldis Hodge and Jonathan Keasey.

Hodge has been writing since he was 18, and he acknowledges it has “helped me develop myself as an artist all around, especially as an actor.”

“[When I’m writing,] I’m sitting there and I have three, four, five, twenty voices in my head,” he says. “And I’m running around my room reading the script, trying to act and perform all these different characters…you find various nuances within that. There are some [writers] who just know how to put black and white on paper, but I started off as an actor, so everything comes from a performative state.”

“I like to think I’m a man of the world in the sense that I get a lot of my information from the world, I get a lot of my information from my interactions with people,” he continues. “And what I see, whether it’s news, other TV shows, what it may be, being able to kind of tap into all of these different voices, sexes, women, non-binary [people]—I’m playing all these people, trying to jump into their minds.”

And that experience “only helps” when he gets a script purely as an actor. “It’s really helped me as a writer to reinvent myself as an actor,” he explains. “And I think, obviously, the acting has helped my writing, as far as being able to be on set with five different actors and really understand how they’re bringing what they’re bringing to the scene…it helps a lot.”

If Hodge has his way, he hopes to continue working behind the scenes on projects. “To be honest with you, I love the process of writing; I love the process of creating and developing,” he says. “I’m probably slowly gonna move to that side of the world. But I love entertaining. And when you entertain, you’ve got to entertain the masses. And you can’t have a singular focus when you do that. You really have to have an open mind and you have to be open to other people’s minds. It’s being able to entertain, educate, inspire, as part of what I do.”

FBI: MOST WANTED, Tuesdays, 10/9c, CBS

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