For Life star Nicholas Pinnock reflects on 'difficult' season 2
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Watch the first scene from the 'For Life' season 2 premiere
'For Life' returns Wednesday, Nov. 18 at 10 p.m. on ABC.
Warning: This article contains spoilers about Wednesday's season 2 finale of For Life.
Aaron Wallace (Nicholas Pinnock) put another win on the board in the For Life season 2 finale.
In the final three episodes of the ABC legal drama's sophomore season, Aaron was appointed special prosecutor on a police brutality case involving an NYPD cop who shot and ultimately killed an unarmed Black man named Andy Josiah, a story that's all too familiar from news headlines. Faced with a legal system actively working against them, Aaron and his team fought to convict the cop, and in the finale, they pulled off a victory of sorts. While the jury found the officer guilty of criminally negligent homicide instead of manslaughter in the first degree, the latter of which was the harsher charge, the judge intervened and gave him the maximum sentence allowed for that count. So justice was served to an extent.
EW hopped on the phone with Pinnock to discuss the difficult season 2, his reaction to the finale, and more.
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ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This finale wraps up this three-episode arc Aaron has been on with this police brutality case. Did you do anything specific to prepare for this storyline?
NICHOLAS PINNOCK: It was really difficult to know what to prepare for because we are all in such new territory, as far as COVID is concerned, not as far as BLM as such, but with the movement that happened and the impact that came with it. There's no preparing for that. We had to just try and in the moment be ready for whatever. For me personally, it was a matter of finding out where Aaron was and taking pieces of where I was at, and where a lot of people were at, with all of the things that were going on, and try and implement aspects of that to bring some believability and realism to everything that's going on. It's a very, very difficult thing to prepare for.
Was it hard for you to separate your perspective from Aaron's?
I'm a person of the world, Aaron is a person within his world, which is meant to be our world, and I think [this issue is] something that affected all of us. For instance, if it was an alien that came down to infiltrate a planet and Aaron had to confront him, I could easily separate myself from something like that because it's never happened to any of us. This was very difficult to separate myself from. Forget the finale, it was a very emotional season because there were so many aspects of our global societal life that were wrapped up in what's happened over the past 12 months. So, I could identify with everything that was going on. Listen, I'm not a lawyer and I'm not trying to flip a cop and get him to go against someone who shot an unarmed Black man. But unarmed Black men get shot regularly enough for it to affect us. Unarmed Black men get killed, let alone shot, far too often for it not to affect us. It affected the globe last year, and it's still affecting people. So yeah, there was definitely a certain amount of, not only me but if I may speak for the cast and the crew and the writers, who were really involved in this story personally and couldn't really separate themselves emotionally from it. There were certain parts of it where his opinion was my opinion, his words were my words, his sentiment was my sentiment, and I think I can speak for a lot of other people.
Given how hard this season was, how did it feel when you arrived at the finale?
In the acting world, there's this saying, "Do you choose a role, or do the roles choose you?" and that's there because so many times you are given, gifted, [or] approached to play a role that kind of reflects your life in some ways and kind of deals with aspects of story that you have encountered similarly and things that can trigger [memories]; it kind of runs parallel with things that you've dealt with. So, this season there were aspects of it where I was like, "Yeah, I've been through that" or "That kind of touches me in a place that's less than surface." So when you get to the end of the season and you're telling this final story, there is a sense of, "I've kind of lived this chapter of Aaron's life and I have relived certain aspects or chapters in my life." You get to the end of it and it's a big relief that you feel immediately because you no longer have the weight or responsibility of telling this story. So you can remove yourself from any emotional and psychological mental aspects of telling this story. Then you're left with, "I miss this person. I miss this tangible aspect of a character I've lived for the past six months, whose voice I've been in, whose physicality I've been in." It takes a while to readjust and become the rest of me again that I give over to playing Aaron for the six months that it takes to make the show.
So there's a sense of relief but also a sense of achievement because not only you, but your costars and the production team and the crew and the writers, and everybody that's been involved, we've all had one goal in mind, which is: Making sure that everything that is seen on screen by the audience is done to the best of its ability. We've all done that. And then you realize, for me, that actually I need to step away from it because the show no longer belongs to me. Aaron doesn't belong to me anymore. At that point, he belongs to the audience, so what I think or feel about it doesn't matter anymore. What matters is what the audience thinks and feels about it because it's theirs to own, claim, and have a sense of ownership of.
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Is there a scene from the finale or the season as a whole that stands out as being the most challenging?
I could lie and make up a scene, but honestly, and this is true, I can't remember what happened. I can't because I don't watch my work, and because of the amount of time we have to film an episode, I don't retain a lot of the information that I maybe could. [Laughs] The only scene in the finale that I can actually remember filming is the final court scene where he has the closing statement. We filmed that, I think, on the last day of filming. And it was so poignant because it was like [the] closing statement for the season. It was really powerful, and I think it was one of those things that hushed the room and touched everybody. Those things you kind of remember.
In real life, cops are rarely charged or convicted in cases like this. Yet, the finale struck a middle ground where the cop isn't found guilty of the most serious charge, but he gets the maximum prison sentence for the lesser charge because of the judge's intervention. How did you feel about how the show wrapped up this case?
I wholeheartedly support the decision that the writers made. Because there are so many different ways it could go. Television is not real life. We could have decided to convict him for the harsher crime and put him away just to say, "We're going to show what doesn't happen in real life to the maximum, and we can all sort of clap our hands in triumph because it's something we all want to see but haven't." Absolutely, we could've done that! But the writers knew what they were doing. The showrunner, Hank [Steinberg], and [executive producer] Sonay [Hoffman] know what they're doing. When it was presented to me and we talked about it, I wholeheartedly believed that was the right thing to do.
As a television show, we are not going to affect change. What we can do is that we can influence whatever that change may be. This middle group for me is perfect because it's saying that people should be [held] accountable for their crimes in some way. The fact that the judge gave the [harshest] sentence hopefully will influence in that world to go, "Huh… maybe there is a way around this because people are getting away with it too much." And when they're getting away with it too much, the only way to have them think twice about their actions is to put them in a situation where they have to think twice about their actions. So, if we can help to influence that way of thinking, fantastic! We're not out to change anything. We are an entertainment show. If along the way, we can educate and influence, brilliant.
There's no word yet on a season 3, but do you have idea yet of where the writers would like to take Aaron next or where you would like to see him go?
That's not a question I'm prepared to answer right now. I know we would all like there to be a season 3. No one knows if there's going to be a season 3 yet. There are plans for a season 3. Story has been developed. Story has been talked about. So, we'll see what comes to fruition throughout all of that.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
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