Missy Peregrym is reflecting on “the most intense episode” she’s ever filmed in her eight seasons of FBI.
In the latest episode of the CBS drama, released on Monday, March 16, Peregryn’s Special Agent Maggie Bell deals with a mission that hits close to home, as she works to track down her sister Erin (Adrienne Rose Bengtsson) after an abduction by Ray DiStefano (Matthew Rauch).
Working alongside Special Agent Omar Adom “OA” Zidan (Zeeko Zaki) and Peter (Zach Grenier), Maggie discovers that DiStefano kidnapped her sister by catfishing her online. Then she discovers Erin’s body and realizes her sister has been killed.
“I’ll never be the same to a certain degree,” Peregrym told TV Insider of her character. “Never. I’ll never be the same. Which again was why I was so scared to go this far with my character. Playing something for eight years and then all of a sudden having a loss like this, you don’t ever go back to the person you were before.”
She added, “You’ve got to navigate a completely different set of, I don’t even know, rules, set of understanding, trying to figure out where your place is anymore. What can you trust? And it’s terrifying.”
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Speaking with the outlet, Peregrym confirmed she “didn’t really” have any conversations with the show’s writers about why it all played out the way it did.
“What they wanted to do was to put Maggie in a position — I mean, they brought together DiStefano, my most vulnerable work person, with my most vulnerable family member and just made this huge explosion, and it’s such good TV,” she said. “I think that was the plan. I think the idea is that to have Peter there, and it’s profiling, this is something that I’ve been working on, and to have to try to figure DiStefano out with my sister being on the line, her life being on the line, trying to beat him to get to her to save her life, there’s nothing else you could take from Maggie.”
As she put it, “I can’t go to a worse place for my character. So, kind of grateful for that. Hopefully things are looking up from here.”
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The actress, who has been playing Maggie on the procedural since 2018, said she was also “wiped” after filming, per Deadline. “I had a serious, emotional come-down after shooting the last scene. I was sitting with anxiety the whole time that I was in the episode,” she said. “Here’s the cool part about acting and the horrible part about it: There’s an opportunity for catharsis when you have experiences in your life where you’ve been to the bottom, and you can bring that for relatability, and people can see that, and there’s a connection through your character. That’s amazing.”
She added, “The other part that sucks is that it doesn’t just go away for me when I’m done. I have to actually sort that out in my body. I have to release that. I have to tell my body that this isn’t real, because my body does not know the difference.”
Moving forward, Peregrym is “actually off the next episode” as her character “deals with the funeral and that stuff.” When she comes back, the actress tells TV Insider, Maggie will “just have to get back to work.”
“What else do I have? This is how [she] dealt with the death of [her] husband, and this is how [she’s] moved forward… It’s the only way [she has] known how to move forward is to get back to work, and I think that’ll help [her] stabilize. I don’t want to say too much, but it’s just not what [she’s] think moving forward.”