FBI’s Missy Peregrym Talks [Spoiler]’s Death, Filming Emotional End Scene

TVLINE | Maggie eventually discovered that her sister was killed by DiStefano. What was it like filming that scene and how were you feeling on set that day?
There were a lot of conversations with [showrunner] Mike [Weiss], with [writer] Mae [Smith], with [director] Yangzom [Brauen], about what we wanted to get out of that moment. For me, I didn’t have a plan, but I needed the room to see what happened, which is why we went with no dialogue. There was nothing planned to say. Yangzom had an idea, of course, of how she was going to end the scene. On the day, I was so nervous to do this the whole time, just with how dark it was and how deep I had to go and it’s game time. You can practice all you want (which I don’t really), we can talk about the scene, we can talk about what we want, we can talk about the tone and what the shots are going to be and what everybody wants. Everybody has a vision for it. And at the end of the day, I have no idea what’s going to come up in my body. All I can do is show up and put myself there.

I made sure that I didn’t see anything. I didn’t see how she was lying. I didn’t see her [Adrienne Rose Bengtsson, who plays Erin] before shooting (which I explained after I was really sorry that I didn’t say hi or tell her that I didn’t know what’s gonna happen), but she was amazing. She stayed so dead the whole time. Zeeko and I laugh all the time on set and it’s how we get through doing this content, but we’re constantly joking around and we have such a good time. And he’s just a very funny guy, and I was like, “Z, I can’t. I need you to just be straight right now.”

So then I went into the woods before we did the take, and I remember we kind of walked through the scene a little bit. We walked through where I was gonna go so they could place the cameras and the lighting — things can go wrong so easily in any take — so we set it up as best as we could without really living it and feeling it. I just remember looking up, and I asked God to help me because I was scared. I’ve been to really dark places with people before and I was scared to let that back in, but I didn’t want to use it. You know what I mean? I wasn’t going away and being like, “Oh, I remember how terrible this was. Let’s put that back in my body,” because it felt… I couldn’t out of respect for where I’d been. So I just sat there and asked to be present. And I remember walking back, standing beside Zeeko, and we grabbed each other’s arms, and Yangzom came and looked at me from down the way. And she just stared at me and I gave her a nod and she gave me a nod back, and she went behind the monitors and that was it. They called action, and I was just off for whatever came up. I feel like I blacked out.

One of the only moments I remember is looking back at Zeeko, and again, no one really prepared for this, and the look on his face was so good. Nobody really knew what was going to happen. I love this scene so much. Everybody was so locked in. We only did that take one time and it was a oner. From me running from the woods, to seeing Peter, seeing his face, and going to the back of the van. Everything on my coverage was done in one take. They had two cameras. The DP Ramsey [Nickell] was like, “What do you need?” I said, “I need to do everything at once, as much as possible.” He said, “Done.” I’m telling you, it was unbelievable. There were zero mistakes with technical equipment, focus, lighting, performance, positions, nothing. Nothing went wrong, and that is incredibly rare. I was very grateful because I didn’t want to go back there. It took me probably five minutes for my body to stop shaking after that.

TVLINE | How will such a huge loss affect Maggie moving forward?
I’m off the next episode. I return [the week after] and think that the best thing to do is to come back to work. It’s how I’ve dealt with loss in the past and it’s the only place I know. It’s my whole life. I just think I’ll get back up on my feet and with time, I’ll move on, and that is not the case. That can’t be the case. I’d never experienced something to this level and it’s not just about losing my sister and the shame and guilt of not being able to protect her. It’s the fact that it’s completely my fault. My lives merged into this horrible center and I lost everything. I didn’t just lose Erin. I lost trust in myself. I lost trust for how I operate in the world and how I communicate and how I move, because that’s what got me here in this position in the first place. There’s no way I can just come back to work and be myself. I don’t even know what that means.