“It’s a pretty stressful one for old Jubes,” Jeremy Sisto says of the February 20 episode of FBI.
In “Remorse,” the president of the NY Fed is gunned down trying to help a woman in peril, leading to the team racing to find the killer and the missing woman. “That in itself is a sort of tragic and relatable entry point into a very exciting and very disturbing episode,” Sisto tells TV Insider.
His character, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Jubal Valentine, is under pressure off the job as well, with his son (Caleb Reese Paul) suspended from school. Sisto previews the stress.
There’s a connection to one of Jubal’s past cases with this episode’s investigation. What can you preview? Is what was going on in his life off the clock during that past case important? Or is it just about that case itself?
Jeremy Sisto: In this past case that is connected to the current one that Jubal worked on, there was a mistake that was made, but it is not, as it has been in the past, connected to some other challenges he might be having in his personal life. It was just something that occurs in this job a lot, and jobs with these kind of stakes, there are going to be mistakes made. It is, I think, something that he has had to come to terms with before, but in some ways, this is more about the job itself and less about his personal challenges.
But there are some personal challenges for him in this episode because he’s dealing with his son’s school suspension. What’s going on there, and how is Jubal handling it?
We’ve all seen Jubal deal with the challenges of being a father, dealing with divorce, dealing with a son who has had a life-threatening disease, who’s discovering himself in middle school and high school and trying to grow strong and all of these different challenges.
This is a first. This challenge is a new one for Jubal. He has to come to terms with the idea that there might be some similar challenges his son will have to face that he’s had to face in his own life, and that is a very difficult thing for a parent. I think one of the hardest things for parents—I know for me—is sort of disengaging your own history with a particular issue that you’ve had to deal with and really seeing your child as their own person. And when it hits so close to home, when the challenges or when the situation is as close as it is in this episode to something that Jubal has had a very long time to handle in his own life, it is a very intense situation. So that amps up this entire case. And so the episode is a pretty stressful one for old Jubes.
And that’s coming after they just lost one of their own. How is everyone doing after Hobbs’ (Roshawn Franklin) death, especially Jubal? He was one of his JOC analysts.
Yes, and Roshawn is a great actor and I loved working with him from the beginning. And so yeah, it’s very hard. There’s so much compartmentalizing that has to occur for someone in this kind of job. They’re all aware that they’re in a profession that is dangerous, and so there is an element of having previously considered the possibilities, but that doesn’t make it any easier when it actually happens.
Is there anything coming up about the ongoing case and the search for his killer?
I do know, as I said in the episode, the FBI doesn’t forgive and they don’t forget. So I imagine this is not something that the team will let rest.
Does Jubal have any concerns when comes to Tiffany (Katherine Renee Kane) and how she’s doing and whether their last conversation in the premiere got through to her?
I don’t think he has concerns about her ability as an agent. I think he knows that she’s young and he knows that handling the stakes of the job and the emotional impact of the job is a journey. And so he will be watching to see how she’s doing because it’s not a straight line to go from understanding the difficulties in theory and actually going through them and handling your own psychological trauma and coming out the other side. So he’s going to be observing her like he does everyone just to make sure she’s on the right path. And of course, Isobel [Alana De La Garza] as well. That’s why there’s always a sense of, are you good right now? And ultimately, we have to put it in their hands and the time we take it out of their hands is when it feels like they are not able to know, if they’re not able to actually be self-aware enough to know, yes, I can handle this. And they’re nowhere near close to that, I don’t think, with Tiffany. I think they have a lot of faith in her.
FBI, Tuesdays, 8/7c, CBS