Shades of Blue is back for a second season on NBC Sundays at 10p and the show is even more intense this year. Jennifer Lopez and Ray Liotta recently talked about what’s coming up on the good cop, very bad cop drama at NBC’s TCA Winter Press Day and you are not going to want to muss a single second this season.
What is coming up for Jennifer Lopez’s character Harlee this season?
Lopez: I mean, the mess just becomes even bigger. And the moral lines and ethical lines are pushed even further, and the struggle becomes even more intense for her because of her daughter, because of who she is as a person and her beliefs. I think what people respond to in Harlee’s character is that, at the end of the day, she’s not, she may have been a cop who, you know, they went around the neighborhood and they collected money and stuff, but they weren’t, in their minds, bad cops. They were really holding the line to what it takes and pushing those areas of black and white and getting in the gray areas there of what it takes to maintain justice and to keep neighborhoods safe. But she was pushed into a further conundrum of what her moral and ethical lines were, and this year, I feel like it goes even further into what she believes is right and wrong. And why people like her is because I think my job is to always keep her truthful but, beyond that, that they feel like she’s still even though you are seeing her do the most outrageous, heinous things, that you still believe that she’s a good person. If I can do that, if I can show you that heart, if I can show you that humanity, then I’m doing my job as far as Harlee is concerned. And I think that we were able to do that this season even with all of the things that this one came up with for me to do that were awful, and for him, too.
Is this season more challenging?
Lopez: It was a challenging season. You know, I thought the first season was so challenging because it was just emotionally taxing. I think our characters mostly take the brunt of that in this series, but for this one, I knew when I read the first page of the first scene of this season. I was, like, “Okay. That’s what we are doing. We are going there. Okay. We are burying the body. Okay. Here we go. Wrap him up in a curtain, and then knock his teeth out. Got it. I’m there.” So I knew that, emotionally, it wasn’t going to get any easier for her. I knew that it was going to be more of I call this like a storm is coming this season. …There’s this some story about Hurricane Sandy, and it really does feel like they get caught in a hurricane that they can’t get out of this season until there’s so much so many casualties and things that happen that she just it’s like sliding down a slippery slope, and she cannot get traction the whole time. She’s just looking to the side of her and hoping that it stops. And, like, she’s going to hit the bottom, and it just doesn’t stop.
What is happening between Harlee and Nava (Gino Anthony Pesi)?
Lopez: I think Nava represents for Harlee, like, that life that she could have if she could get out of the mess that she’s in and that she’s kind of created for herself. He’s like the dream. Do you know what I mean? And he keeps coming back to help her. Instead of him kind of rescuing her, she somehow sucks him into her world unintentionally. He just gets caught up in the mess of what happens this season in a really bad way. And I think Harlee is just, you know, again, one of these characters that is so complicated in that she’s so pulled to Woz and she’s so pulled to the loyalty and the code of what they have and what they must do and, at the same time, struggling with her own moral compass as a mother and as a good person and wanting to be a good person after what she’s done, I think, at the beginning of this season, after having killed Miguel at the end of last season, which she felt that she had no choice, that she would never be free of him — to then, at the beginning of this season, say to her daughter, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I promise I’m going to make better choices,” and then to be sucked back in, again, because of the complexities of the relationship she has with Woz and the crew and her loyalty to them.
What about Woz’s (Liotta) love life?
Liotta: No. I think Woz is “tri-sexual.” He’ll try anything.
Yeah. They stayed away from that aspect this season, but the relationship that I have with Anna Gunn is not your everyday, you know, go on a date and with a movie. I mean, we have a scene where it turns into very rough S&M y kind of sex. So this is probably something that Jack is trying to exorcise from himself.
Finally, what about Harlee’s relationship with her daughter Cristina (Sarah Jeffery)?
Lopez: Actually my scenes with Cristina are probably some of the easiest for me to do, and it’s because I am a mom and I do feel such an affinity and an affection toward her and I know our relationship is so clear. The way I feel about her is so untainted. It is what it is. It’s unconditional. It’s fierce. It’s deep. It’s what you have for a child. Everything we play together has that. She’s really the biggest joy in her life and the only joy in her life at the time, really, besides kind of getting to know Nava and following in love with him over this season and getting a little more serious with him. That’s her whole world. So for me, it makes it easy.
