‘The Resident’ Boss on That Bell Cliffhanger, Conrad’s Love Life & Kincaid’s Secrets

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Resident Season 5, Episode 10 “Unknown Origin.”]

Dr. Randolph Bell (Bruce Greenwood) has a secret, everyone’s becoming suspicious, and right now, only one person knows what’s going on: Dr. Conrad Hawkins (Matt Czuchry), who ran tests on him.

The Resident winter finale just ended on the cruelest of cliffhangers, with Conrad about to tell Bell the cause for his hand tremor and vertigo, which reared its ugly head once again in “Unknown Origin.” Also in the episode, Conrad joined Dr. Kit Voss’ (Jane Leeves) Flight Go team and met fellow doctor Kincaid Sullivan (Kaley Ronayne), whose expertise came in handy back at Chastain and led to a job offer. But while Kit has brought her on temporarily, there’s a matter of the secrets Cade is keeping, ones that Conrad and Dr. Devon Pravesh (Manish Dayal) are digging into after online searches came up with zero results.

Executive producer Andrew Chapman teases what’s ahead.

What can you say about what’s going on with Bell? Is there a medical cause? Is it stress?

Andrew Chapman: I can’t give away too much. It’s definitely medical. It’s definitely going to be an issue that we play going into the future. It’s going to be important for his character and for his soap with Kit and his relationship to Conrad, who obviously will know about it but has been sworn to secrecy. And it will mark sort of a new path for Bell. [There’s] very much a level of drama and stakes really for Bell and where he’s going with his life and how he continues to be a doctor at Chastain. It’s a real thing. We’re definitely going to dive into it.

How’s he going to react to whatever it is? I liked seeing him remove himself from the OR when he had to.

Yeah, the thing about Bell’s character is it’s been such a long arc of redemption. Here’s a guy who literally opened the show by killing somebody. His first scene, Season 1, Episode 1, he kills an appendectomy patient on the table and then covers it up. He’s a bad guy.

Tom Griscom/FOX

And now here he is Season 5, knowing that there’s a problem. He doesn’t know what the problem is. So he takes himself off of the surgery rotation to protect patients so that that thing never happens again. We just love that as an arc for the character, that he’s redeemed himself and that’s kind of wonderful, and I think that audiences really love that about him. He’s gone from this really problematic surgeon to somebody who’s gonna step away, at least temporarily, from the thing he loves to make sure that people are OK.

He hasn’t told Kit, but there was that sweet moment when she acknowledged that she knows there is something going on.

Isn’t that a wonderful scene? Jane Leeves and Bruce Greenwood are just so fantastic together.

What’s next in their relationship?

They’re the power couple of the hospital. He can hide things from her for only so long before she’s going to figure it out and they’re going to need to work out what the deal is. So in Episode 11, after we come back from the Christmas holiday, we’re going to dive right into that and they’re going to have to work out exactly what the problem is and how to deal with it. That’s going to become a huge storyline.

Tom Griscom/FOX

What are the chances of a wedding this season?

How do I say this? [Laughs] It’s not a 0% chance, let’s just put it that way. It’s not off the table and it will be discussed. The issue of a wedding will be on people’s lips.

Speaking of relationships, Conrad’s apparently ready to start dating, but he and Marion [Ana Mackenzie] seem to have taken a relationship off the table.

Yeah. The idea is we’re all human, we all need physical contact and we all want what we want, and Conrad does, too, and it’s been a while and he’s dipping his toe into the water, so to speak. You and I talked about this in the past; the season’s about work-life balance, the season’s about we lost [Conrad’s wife] Nic [Emily VanCamp] and then how do we as a show, Conrad as a character, how does he move forward?

Having a little moment with Marion is moving forward, and we’ll see where that goes. It rears its head, that relationship, over the course of the next couple episodes, but other relationships, too. Matt Czuchry and creator Amy Holden Jones and all of us talk extensively about how much we believe Conrad would be ready to really have a solid relationship. He’s not a play the field kind of guy. This is an ongoing discussion,

Nathan Bolster/FOX

There was that moment when Billie [Jessica Lucas] was watching Conrad leave with GiGi [Remington Blaire Evans] and Marion.

Wasn’t that a wonderful moment? The emotion on her face as she watches them go is so complicated and interesting. Such a wonderful actress, Jessica Lucas. There’s a lot of connection between Billie and Conrad. They have history in Nic. They have love of a shared person. They have love of a new person in the world, GiGi, and that can lead to interesting things. So don’t discount it.

Kincaid clearly has some secrets considering that Conrad and Devon’s search came up with nothing online. What can you say about how you’ll be revealing more about her?

That one I’m really not going to give away. That one we have plotted out right to the very end of the season. She does have secrets. She does have a past and that past is complicated and will play into how we’re going to wrap up the season and what we dive into in the world of medicine and in the world of relationships going right up until the season finale. The best thing that I can say about it is it’s very current and explosive and will be really interesting. I think people are gonna love it.

So you can’t say if it has to do with her career, family, an ex, something else?

It has to do with her career, for sure. It has to do with medicine.

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What are we going to see from Conrad and Kincaid? Their dynamic was fun in this episode.

Right? I keep thinking of them as like Butch and Sundance. They’re just having one adventure after another. We’ll see that same sort of dynamic. We love the idea of the Go team, which is what you see started in the episode and Go teams are where there’s some big accident or some problem that’s far away from a hospital and the EMTs can’t handle it, paramedics, it’s above their pay grade medically. So they fly doctors to the scene and that’s a really exciting, fun thing to do. So we’ll definitely do that again. Conrad and Cade are going to be hardcore members of the Go Team, and so they’ll definitely have that Butch and Sundance thing going.

But also the mystery of who she is, where she came from, what is in her past, that’s going to be a big deal for Conrad. He’s going to want to try to figure that out. We’ll see him begin to figure it out over the course of the next couple of episodes.

The Resident, Winter Premiere, Tuesday, February 1, 8/7c, Fox