Michael Emerson Previews Finch’s ‘Dark Side’ in the ‘Person of Interest’ Series Finale

As Person of Interest prepares to air its final episode, we spoke with star Michael Emerson about his time on the show and the intensity of the last season. “It was a rough shoot, but a very good shoot,” he says of the process. Cutting the number of episodes allowed the writers to use “all the best stuff they had sketched out for 22 and put them into 13,” he says. “And that’s what they did. I don’t remember a season of ours that was this compact and thrilling.”

The final 13 episodes have been bleak, but Emerson says it wasn’t because of him. “As soon as we started filming [Season 5], the writers were coming and saying, ‘Man, watch out — Finch is going to the dark side!’” But he says that’s a literary abstraction, and, as an actor, all he ever did was play the scene. “I just played straight Finch,” he says. In watching the finished episodes, though, he saw how the writers had altered the tone of everything around him. “And then, suddenly, there’s Finch looking a little bit more like Benjamin Linus [Emerson’s character on Lost],” he says.

“The actor/writer conversation,” as he calls it, seems to be the key to the show’s success. “My job is to keep finding interesting ways to deliver their lines in front of the camera,” Emerson says. “And then they’ll watch it and they’ll get ideas from that and they’ll send their ideas in the form of future scripts.” There’s not much humor in Season 1, but Emerson says the writers saw “the little twinkle in the eyes of these two guys” — meaning himself and co-star Jim Caviezel — which led to their “wonderful Odd Couple-ness” that became the tone for all of Team Machine. “There’s no reason why they couldn’t have a joke now and then,” he says. “There’s no reason they couldn’t have little tiffs and spats like roommates do.” That levity allowed the show to go to even darker and more cerebral places while still being fun to watch.

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This season was as analytical as you’ll find on television. It’s no small feat to make a compelling villain out of subtitles, but that’s essentially — until these last few episodes — what Samaritan and the Machine are. “One of my chief pleasures in doing this show was talking to artificial intelligence,” the actor says. Emerson practically glows when he recalls shooting the interrogation scene from Episode 10. “That’s a conversation we think he’s having with the FBI, then we realize it’s him talking to Samaritan,” he says. It’s also a conversation he’s having with himself. “He’s sick of his own uselessness. He’s sick of his own bad decisions,” Emerson says.

Because the only voice we hear is his, these dialogues end up exposing additional layers of the character and make us ask questions beyond just the ones introduced by the plot. He’s struggling to come to terms with a weapon he created — only that weapon is alive and, in many respects, his child. “We see the work Finch has to do to find a vocabulary for ethics,” Emerson says, marveling at show creators Greg Plageman and Jonathan Nolan’s ability to do just that. “The Machine won’t accept anything that is illogical,” he says. “How do we put our humanity into a language that is both humane and logical?” It’s clear that he has succeeded, since, in the end, the Machine reveals a capacity for self-sacrifice — allowing itself to die in order to take down Samaritan.

Emerson has no immediate plans to return to work. “I’m perfectly happy to vegetate for a while,” he says. When he is ready, he says he “wouldn’t mind finding a good play and going back on the stage. Something historical would be nice. Something funny would be nice.” It sounds like he’s angling for a role in Hamilton, which wouldn’t be as much of a stretch as it seems. Leslie Odom Jr., who played Collier for eight episodes in Season 3, just won a Tony for his work on the musical. “If only I could sing and dance,” Emerson says with woeful good humor. “It would be fun to be loud and laughable again after spending so many years being quietly sinister or intense.”

He’s selling himself short: His turn as Uncle Ralph singing Twisted Sister in Episode 6 is one of the most laugh-out-loud moments in the show’s run. “I think it’s the silliest thing I’ve ever done in front of a camera,” he says. Though he swears he’s not a singer, he does admit to singing along to “old punk and post-punk bands” in his private time. “Buzzcocks or the Clash,” he says. “I like me some rock ’n’ roll.”

“You never really get a satisfactory ending on a TV show,” Emerson laments, though he isn’t talking about the ending that will air. “When a show wraps, everybody scatters,” he says. “It’s not like you’re still hanging around the clubhouse or anything.” Actors may have had their final scenes weeks earlier, and “you’ll always be happy to see those people again,” he says, but rarely do they stay in touch away from work. “My life as an actor is full of so many farewells,” Emerson says.

The series finale of Person of Interest airs Tuesday, June 21 at 10 p.m. on CBS.