‘Will Trent’ Star Erika Christensen Unpacks Those Angie Bombshells

Erika Christensen, whom Will Trent fans know best as Angie Polaski, has been an actress for more than 25 years now. Her many credits include the films Traffic (2000), The Banger Sisters (2002) and The Upside of Anger (2005) as well as the beloved Ron Howard-produced NBC series Parenthood, which ran on NBC from 2010 to 2015.

Since Will Trent premiered in 2023, Christensen has breathed complex life into Angie, a cop who shares Will Trent’s (Ramón Rodríguez) complicated foster care past. That experience trauma bonded the two who have been linked since adolescence. Angie is constantly fighting her many other demons. Suffering sexual abuse as a young girl fueled her reckless behavior as a young woman who used alcohol, drugs and sex to numb her childhood pain.

Last season, she and Will’s would-be happily ever ending blew up when Will discovered that she covered up a young girl named Crystal killing her sexually abusive stepfather who also victimized her. She also failed to disclose that Crystal was behind the killing of other pedophiles. Because Will is a straight arrow, he didn’t keep her secret. He, instead, did the unthinkable and arrested her. Their relationship has not been the same since. As the season has progressed, they’ve made their way back to speaking terms but mainly as co-workers.

Angie’s personal life has been quite interesting. Just as she was finding peace with Seth, the attractive doctor Scandal and Felicity star Scott Foley portrays, her biological mother Didi Polaski, who began pimping her out as a child, dies. Instead of feeling free, Angie is so emotionally wrecked she starts drinking again. And then she gets the surprise of her life when she finds out she may be a mother. That discovery sends shock and panic through every inch of her.

Unlike past seasons, Christensen wasn’t sitting on the sidelines for this one. In addition to taking Angie through all these lows and unexpected surprises, Christensen made her TV directorial debut with season three’s penultimate episode 17, “Why Hello, Sheriff,” arguably one of this series’ most explosive episodes. In a twist few could see coming, Will finds his biological father during an investigation. Caleb, played by Yul Vazquez from Severance, is also a cop who also had absolutely no idea about Will.

The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Christensen going into Tuesday night’s season three finale to discuss navigating her TV directorial debut with so much personal drama and if it’s really the end between Angie and Will.

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How did you get so lucky for the penultimate episode of season three to be your TV directorial debut?

I did get lucky. I was originally assigned a different episode, and then, because of two big scheduling factors, we had to swap everything around. I ended up getting this one, and I was so excited. It pulls no punches. It’s just like nonstop bombshells throughout the whole episode.

How long did you know you wanted to direct? What kind of preparation did you do?

I have directed short films, and I have said previously that I wanted to direct TV, but I didn’t feel it as genuinely as I did with this show. Because I love this team, and I love collaborating with this team, and I love feeling like I’m part of the team, directing is just kind of the ultimate in that feeling of like I’m really on the team. And I really had been asking for this job, and saying, “Okay, here we are.”

I know the tone of this show. I know I’m in the trenches here. I know these characters, and I know what we do and I’d be so honored to do it.’ And so then, they said yes. And as I mentioned, I previously was scheduled to do a different episode, potentially an episode in which I had less on-screen crazy drama to contend with but I’m very happy that it turned out this way, and I really enjoyed tackling Angie’s storyline as well as the Will Caleb storyline and the cases and Ormewood’s ongoing health threat, which, ironically, as heavy as that is, that was where so much of the humor came from in this episode.

How long did you have to prepare for the episode?

Not long. The writers were really under the gun to get the scripts out. And because we had to shoot the episodes out of order, they had to write 317 before they were prepared to write 317 so I didn’t have much time. We had just the normal I guess a week or eight days of prep. It was a whirlwind of fun, and of course, I still had to shoot. But the team is really competent and tight and communicative, and they appreciated what I [had] to deal with. I was like, “Cool, you guys keep prepping this episode. Text me when you find out this and that, and text me photos of this and that, and I gotta go shoot some scenes.”

Did Ramón like directing give you even more confidence?

There are plenty of actors who direct their own shows. It’s your mental capacity for it, but it’s also a logistical issue. And since he often has way more on-screen [time] to contend with than I do, I was like ‘great, I got this.’ He was directing the season premiere. He just had the biggest grin on his face the whole time.

You alluded to it but Angie’s still going through a lot. It’s not as dramatic as the previous episode, which was really a lot for Angie in losing her mom. But now she’s contemplating whether she can be a mother or not.

Yeah. After just having seen the kind of mother she had, now the audience has all the context for this decision. I think her struggle will be to be present with the decision and divorce it from her own mother, because she doesn’t want to make the decision to spite her mother, to prove her wrong and make it about her. Or she doesn’t want to let the trauma that [her mother] inflicted sort of win and make her too scared to confront this new, potentially really beautiful chapter. So, yeah, she has a lot to consider. And then there’s Seth who is like a very emotionally evolved person who’s up for the challenge, not only of parenthood, but of being with Angie.

How was it being in such an emotional place and, also, directing? How were you able to manage those two things? Because even though Angie’s not doing as much as last episode, and a lot of what we see being more internal than external, you had to play here and, also, be responsible for a show that has at least two or three other very intense things going on at the same time.

I ended up considering it like five different storylines, because there’s Will’s case, and then his relationship with Caleb, and then the case that they turn up, which is the bioweapon, not the murders, and then Ormewood’s health, and then Angie’s whole storyline. So, there’s a lot going on. You know the on-screen part is where I’m comfortable because I’ve been doing it my whole life. When we were shooting days where I had no on-screen time, it was like, “Oh, this is fun. I don’t have to go through hair and makeup, and I can just be here.”

And then on the days where I was working, I went through hair and makeup first, regardless of when my scene was in the day, just so we didn’t have to take a break for me to go through hair and makeup. That doesn’t mean that I knew exactly what it looked like, especially like my own face. I didn’t know what it was doing, necessarily, until I watched it. But I found that it didn’t require me watching a whole lot of it for me to understand what we got. And, so we’d shoot, and then I’d watch a little bit and be like ‘great, okay, yeah, this is okay, and then the next one is going to be tighter in here, and then, but can it be like that?’ We’d quickly work it out, and then I would hop back into the hospital bed or whatever. It ended up working really well. It only added a little bit of time for me to have to take those peeks at what we had just shot. But we accounted for that in scheduling, and it worked out.

So, let’s talk about how you also handled and shot Will finding out who his father was in the most you know Will Trent of ways. In the episode, you had shots focusing on Will’s jawline, and then over to the father, Caleb’s jawline. When the two of them first appeared on screen together, nobody’s thinking they even looked alike. Then once this bombshell truth comes out, those shots are like “oh, wow, yes they do.”

Yule, who plays Caleb, even found some character similarities between Caleb and Will. It’s so great, because you’re right, you don’t see it coming at all. And then once the truth is there, it’s like, ‘Oh, look at these two. That is a father and son.’ That scene where Caleb comes to Will’s door, I love so much. Will has so much defensiveness, but Caleb has a sort of an apologetic sense about him. Even though he did nothing wrong, he had no idea Will existed; he didn’t abandon him. There was no choice to be made, but that moment where they’re first standing there looking at each other’s faces, I was like, “You guys enjoy that. Enjoy taking as much time as you want to look at each other’s faces and recognize each other. See, look at him. See that. Yeah, that is your son, and that is your father.” And Ramón kept going ‘yeah he is my father.’

Though Will didn’t know his father, they have so many similar characteristics. They are both in the same line of work as cops, which is wild, especially since, again, they never knew each other. What does this mean for Will going forward?

I think Will and Caleb have the potential for a much healthier relationship going forward. They seem to at least have gained each other’s respect a bit by the end of this episode, so we’ll see where that ultimately goes. But it’s such a lovely thing to sort of, at this stage of Will’s life, redeem some [good] parts of himself that he [lost] when he assumed that James Ulster was his father, this awful person who he hates, and didn’t want to know for sure [was his father]. But then Will and Caleb get off on the wrong foot. But, ultimately, they have the potential to have a healthy relationship at this stage of Will’s life, which is so fascinating.

Talk about Amanda and her protectiveness, her “Mama Bearness” if you will, coming out in her subtle but aggressive scene with Caleb concerning Will.

Yeah, I love that. It’s like half threat and half just the truth. Like, who do you think you are? Caleb’s just, like ‘I just got here. I don’t know. I’m trying.’ And nobody’s ready for it. Amanda’s not ready for it. Will’s not ready for it. Caleb’s not ready for it.

When Will speaks to Angie and learns that her mom died, his comment, “Some people aren’t meant to be mothers,” without knowing Angie’s condition and the decision she’s wrestling with, stings. You could just feel Angie’s hurt and pain. Will, again, has no clue, but the audience knows, and so does Angie.  

Yeah, it’s such a painful statement. It’s insightful, and he’s so justified in having said it because she didn’t tell him that she’s pregnant. He clearly would not have said that had she shared with him the truth, but she’s trying to have this private moment where she can process and try to come to a decision of what her life might look like going forward. It’s such a big decision, you know? And thank goodness Seth is not pushing her to make a decision. It’s her decision to make. She’s trying to make it for herself and for this person that she would be potentially bringing into the world, not for her mother, not for Seth, not for Will, not for anybody else.

How do you think Will finding his father may complicate something more within Angie, especially since she’s worried about inheriting the worst traits of her mother at this trying time? And what does this mean for those who still hold out hope that Will and Angie can still be a thing, especially since we haven’t seen Will’s love interest in a while.

I don’t know. I love that they have each other in the way that family does, in the way that you just don’t lose each other and you’re just still there.

Faith and Angie don’t interact as much, so to see Faith with Angie during one of Angie’s most vulnerable moments is a special thing. We don’t often see them be tender with each other, and Faith is really kind and understanding with Angie in the bathroom scene.

Faith has the simplest way to address what Angie could make very complicated, and she’s the only one who can speak on the subject with any authority because she knows because she is a mother. So I think Angie will find Faith to be very valuable as a friend, to connect with on a much deeper level than they’ve ever had the opportunity to before.

With Angie’s new relationship with Seth, played by Scott Foley, what makes them work?

He is just such an emotionally evolved person, the way that he takes it in stride when Angie falls off the wagon and, he says, ‘that happens.’ He doesn’t place blame, and he doesn’t scream and call her names the way that Angie almost hopes he would, so that she could have a reason to hate him instead of hating herself. He just asks essentially what happened. And she then has the opportunity to examine what happened and give him a little bit of the truth of her mom having passed, but no context.

He is such a stable, loving person that it just seems like he can handle her. He knows who Angie is. He doesn’t want to change her. He doesn’t want to fix her. He doesn’t hope that she’s going to become someone else. He sees her and he loves her, and he’s not triggered by her, and she’s not triggered by him. They just have that freshness, and he has all of the depth of understanding with his own sobriety and struggles to bring also to the relationship. So I definitely think they have hope for a future together.

Her mom’s ashes are somewhere in the sewer and she’s talking to her in that bathroom, but she’s beating herself up because she still loves her mom, she still wants her mom, and she doesn’t feel like she should.

She doesn’t feel like she should still love someone that wasn’t good to her, that she should seek the approval of someone who doesn’t deserve to have their opinion to account for anything because she was, in Angie’s own words, an awful mother. And so it’s hard to reconcile that sort of inherent love and just like starstruckness. It’s somewhat of a familiar phenomenon we’ve seen in some stories where the mother is so undeserving of this adoration, and the child just still sees them for all of their good qualities.

They’re just overwhelmed with love and there’s nothing wrong with loving someone but trying to please them, or trying to emulate them, or trying to do anything that aligns you with all of their bad qualities is the problem. And Angie, I think, is [realizing] “I have to live my life for myself, and I’m still living it for her. She’s not even around, and if she were around, she’d be awful.” [Angie is] just trying to really live her own life.

It shows the weight that trauma has on us. Finally, talk about Angie and Ormewood’s relationship and, how, with so much on her plate, if Angie can even be there for Ormewood during this scary period of his life with his health.  

They’re like siblings to me. They both have toward each other sort of a tough love instinct, where they don’t want to admit how much they care, but they really deeply care about each other. They’ve come to be really close, but I definitely think of them as siblings. And I think, despite whatever she has coming down the pike for her, she’s going to be there for him for whatever he has to endure. And honestly, I don’t know where that storyline is going, but I know that they’re essentially brother and sister.

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Will Trent’s season three finale airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. on ABC, streaming next day on Hulu.