SEAL Team’s Beau Knapp on Drew’s ‘Breakthrough Moment’: ‘You Gave Up a Part of Your Soul to Get
There’ Put a SEAL team in an abandoned restaurant with no air conditioning for days, a storm raging outside, and high above all of that, and it’s the perfect high-pressure situation. That’s the case in the latest episode of SEAL Team, which ends with Bravo’s newest member, Drew Franklin (Beau Knapp), revealing why he’s always kept his distance from the rest of the team.
It turns out Drew is part of Echo—he wasn’t with the rest of the team when they were killed in Jalalabad. But even after opening up, he’s still not ready to let anything change or be anything but professional, he’s stressed. The episode then ends with Jason (David Boreanaz) surprising the team by revealing that they’ll have to continue without him—he’s returning to be with his son, who needs reconstructive surgery after a hockey injury.
Below, Knapp talks about Drew’s vulnerability, that pivotal scene, and what’s coming next.
Drew finally opens up to Bravo, but it’s in the midst of this tense situation. Talk about filming that scene.
Beau Knapp: That episode was special. Jessica Paré directed it, and she’s amazing. She’s so intimate, everyone knows each other. And it’s funny, we were stuck in that room for five days straight. You go into that room just to film, and they set you up to go crazy in there. And there’s all this tension, people chasing each other and everything, so there’s some real emotion that happens in that room.
It was definitely a moment where Drew made me nervous – not nervous, but I was really looking forward to Drew’s moment in the series because I think it was a breakthrough moment for him, or at least for the audience to understand who he is, why he is the way he is, and that he’s not just a complete asshole and that they all have something in common. While we were shooting, we did a few takes, everyone was so fluid, and then the real stuff came out when you just have to bare a piece of your soul to get there. And it was great because in four episodes, my character Drew is going to confront people head-on, and it was refreshing to just be vulnerable and open to change. I know that he wants – I think that’s why he resists so much, even as he’s making progress with the group, is because he feels a connection starting to be made. He feels like he’s part of the team and he doesn’t want to because he doesn’t want to get hurt again, and he puts so much responsibility on himself for what happened to Echo that it’s very difficult to go through anything like that again or open up like that to a team again.
What do you think it would take for him to open up if it weren’t for this situation? Would he ever just sit there?
Maybe if we had 22 episodes and he could spend more time on it. But I think it came at the perfect time and no, I don’t think so—I think he’s so stubborn, there’s so much guilt and shame and integrity, and I mean it all comes out through his pride and he’s always guarded, but I feel like Drew saw that this team was falling apart that he really cared about deep down. I think it was his way of bringing people together or showing that we’ve made some progress here and we need each other. And like Clay said, that everyone needs a team. I think he finally understood that.
And it’s funny because it’s an emotional moment where Drew, obviously he’s going to go back to being an asshole or being cocky, but there’s always going to be a moment where you see him as a person. Hopefully, that just gives him a chance to open up a little bit more and really be on a team and really build trust with people and be open to living again and be open to believing and fighting for the good cause.
Does the dynamic with the rest of Bravo change or is he going back to the way he was before, not really?
I can’t reveal too much, but I think like we talked about before, if he feels like he’s getting closer to anyone or dangerous or any kind of connection, that’s going to trigger him, I need to destroy everything. I need to push. I need to burn every house, every bridge. Because building relationships and building trust and caring about these people just creates the opportunity to get hurt again, to lose people again, and I don’t think Drew thinks he can handle that loss again. I think it’s suspicious that he doesn’t know if he can handle that again. And so, yeah, I think that’s when he definitely opens up and shows his true colors.
