Here’s the good news: Eamonn Walker is returning to Chicago Fire as Wallace Boden in this week’s episode. But here’s the bad news: Boden’s return is bad news for Firehouse 51.
“Unfortunately, a terrible situation,” Walker, 62, tells PEOPLE of his first episode of the hit NBC drama since his departure last May. “There’s a fire that 51 thought was over and done with until they heard an alarm go off and then realized that they left a man behind. That person has ended up in the hospital and we may potentially lose them.”
The cause for concern doesn’t end there.
“Because of that, almost straight away, an investigation starts and Deputy Commissioner Boden turns up at 51 to find out what happened, whose fault it is, and then maybe a head will roll,” Walker adds. “So not only do you potentially lose one of your 51ers in hospital, you potentially lose one because I fire them.”
Read on for more of Walker’s warnings about the April 16 episode and details of his bittersweet return to the set.
Dermot Mulroney, Miranda Rae Mayo, Eamonn Walker, Taylor Kinney and David Eigenberg on Chicago Fire.
Peter Gordon/NBC
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PEOPLE: How did it feel for you to be back on set?
EAMONN WALKER: The welcoming was so warm. I had missed them terribly and to find out that they had missed me as much was fantastic. There were tears for arriving and starting filming the first day, and there were tears at the end when I left. One is always happy if one knows that one’s left one’s mark somewhere, and what I didn’t realize until I left was how much everybody had left their mark on me. So it was a real pleasure to be back.
When you return to certain places, especially where you’ve spent a lot of time, it can be a bit of a sensory overload. Was there a moment when you first set foot back on set that hit you like that?
There were many. The weirdest moment was very quickly after I go and talk to all the officers and the chief. This wasn’t a moment in the script, but I ad-libbed it anyway because I had to acknowledge it within myself because I was feeling it. I turned round to Dom [Pascal, played by Dermot Mulroney] and I go, “Your office, let’s go.” And he goes, “Oh, okay.” There are all of those feelings because I’m standing in an environment that I stood in all of this time, but I had to acknowledge that I’ve actually got another office in another building, and I had to let all of this go. And that happened in the scene while we were filming it. I didn’t even know I was going to say it. So you’re right. There’s things that come up.
David Eigenberg on Chicago Fire.
Peter Gordon/NBC
So do you think maybe for the next season, you would do more than one episode?
If they write it. It’s all about the storyline. You need to talk to Andrea [Newman, an executive producer] about that. Because when they wrote this episode and said, “Would you come and do it?” And I read it and was like, “Yes, sign me up. Where am I going?” It’s an amazing episode, a wonderful piece of writing and shot in a way that has not been shot before as far as I was concerned, written in a way that has not been written in all of the years I was there, I never saw an episode written like this.
