‘9-1-1’: Ryan Guzman Talks ‘Risky Business’ Dance, Upcoming Eddie Reprise
[Warning: The following contains major spoilers for 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 6 “Confession.”] Goodbye, mustache. Hello, new Eddie (Ryan Guzman)!
The latest 9-1-1 episode begins with Eddie in the confessional, but it turns out that what he really needs is a talk with the priest (a returning Gavin Stenhouse) outside the church. After the two meet and the priest tells him to stop punishing himself and find joy, Eddie takes those words to heart, shaves off his mustache (as a disguise, since he can’t grow a beard as a firefighter) and pays tribute to Risky Business with a dance around his living room.
TV Insider spoke with Guzman about that dance, the upcoming Eddie and more. Plus, read what showrunner Tim Minear had to say about the episode’s key moments, including Eddie, Buck (Oliver Stark) and Tommy’s (Lou Ferrigno Jr.) breakup, and Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Chimney’s (Kenneth Choi) happy news here.
We have to start with that Risky Business dance because it was great to see you dancing again. Speaking of filming that.
Ryan Guzman: It was fun. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ve danced like that on screen in almost a decade. So it was fun to get back to that little version of myself. It’s a little Eddie meets Ryan, but I wanted to show something different. It’s not going to be Step Up, it’s not going to be a perfectly choreographed dance. I wanted to show Eddie just in his most childish behavior and really immerse himself and have a great time with it. So it was fun, really fun.
It was great to see him smile because my heart was breaking for him all season. It seemed like the priest said what he needed to hear, but why do you think it was a priest that he needed to hear that instead of Bobby or Buck or anyone else in his life?
I think sometimes when you’re so close to someone, the message really doesn’t hold water. So it’s necessary to have a third party come in and give you some outside influence. What better than a—I mean, we all know Eddie’s Catholic— [Laughs] He loves being Catholic, but then he doesn’t, and he keeps going back and forth. So who better than a priest to come in and save the day?
And it seems like he needs to get out of the church, because of that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously a Catholic can get anything like that outside of the church, which I think we all know Eddie is unconventional. So it takes a priest to come and meet him on his own terms and really make it a grounded message. It’s not like a priest talking to one of his subordinates; it’s just a man talking to another man and giving him great advice.
When I talked to Tim yesterday, he said Eddie has to figure himself out. What do you think Eddie has to figure out as he moves forward?
I think whatever you did at the beginning, you did very, very badly. So I think finding love for yourself, if you haven’t done that, you’re probably going to be very bad at it. So while I love the scene where he jumps and gives him the opportunity to say, “This is a great first step.” After that first step, it’s going to be a little bit difficult for him. “Now, where do I go? I did Risky Business. I did my dream, but how do I do that in my day-to-day life?” So it’s going to be interesting to see how Eddie tries to come to terms with this new version of himself.
Yeah, I’m going to say that, although there’s some joy in it, it doesn’t mean everything’s fixed. He knows now that he can move forward. Are we going to see some of that juxtaposition of pain and joy in the future?
I think there’s going to be more awkwardness, like he’s trying to get out of his comfort zone and he’s not very good at it, so he’s relying on his teammates, his 118 family, and just coming up with ideas and coming up with a personality, I guess. Trying to figure it out on his own. Yeah, it’s going to be awkward, it’s going to be funny. It’s going to be a lot of different things. I had fun playing with Eddie.
