‘The Rookie’: Melissa O’Neil Talks Surprise of Lucy as Training Officer & Seth’s Lies

With Lucy Chen now a training officer, Melissa O’Neil has learned something new about her character this year on The Rookie.

“I have always felt that Lucy was a person who, perpetually, to a fault, gave people the benefit of the doubt and was always giving them chance after chance after chance,” O’Neil tells TV Insider as part of our Booked: The Rookie Aftershow. That’s not the case with her rookie, Seth (Patrick Keleher), whom she has caught in lies about his girlfriends.

While she thinks that stems from how she feels about her younger brother, O’Neil admits that she was surprised by how suspicious Lucy has been of Seth (she does some investigating when things don’t add up). “I feel like she might believe him to a fault. I feel like that might be her fallibility as far as being a training officer, but I really appreciated that they actually decided to lean into her intuition and the strength of her intuition in this way and allowing that to kind of unfold with that,” she says. “She has a nose for it. I like that instead of leaning into this kindness that she has, we opted to lean into the fact that she’s actually really good at her job and sniffing out something instinctively that is amiss.”

After Lucy confronted Seth about the lies, and he blamed stress and panicking, he said it was a wake-up call and he’ll change going forward. Lucy’s not so sure she can believe that. “Her gut and everything she’s seeing is telling her otherwise,” according to O’Neil. “There’s this constant inner conflict.” She adds that Keleher’s “sweet, charming face and the way he plays it [as] so endearing and sincere” makes it even harder.

Lucy did plan to talk to Grey (Richard T. Jones) about Seth … only for Seth to tell him right before that his cancer is back, but it was caught early and he can still work. O’Neil says that part of Lucy did wonder if he was lying about the cancer. “She feels like he’s lying, but how do you accuse someone of lying about having cancer without looking like an absolute off-the-rocker or insensitive human being? So it’s a wonderfully impossible situation, especially for a character like Lucy,” she explains.

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Amidst these questions about Seth, Lucy is going to be putting her faith in him for an undercover assignment in the February 18 episode, “The Mickey.” O’Neil reveals the stakes of that are “a lot higher” than just trusting him to have her back.

“She’s trusting him to have somebody else’s back, not hers,” she previews. “It really elevates the stakes for their relationship and the consequences of his potential lying. If he is lying, it really just all of the tension starts ramping up because of that mission that she sets him onto.”

Lucy has been talking to Tim (Eric Winter), but after the exes hooked up on Valentine’s Day, O’Neil tells us she expects them to try to maintain some distance. Does that mean she won’t continue to turn to him about Seth?

“That’ll be the interesting thing,” notes O’Neil. “It’s leaning back onto the fact that they’re such good teammates and she trusts him implicitly as a mentor outside of it. That is the origin of their relationship. Even though she has never felt that his methods were maybe always pure, she has always respected his capacity and his opinion and his insight in these ways.” That part of their relationship remains the same.

“That’s the beautiful thing about them, as messy and confusing and wonderful and sweet as their out-of-work relationship has become,” she continues. “That’s really important as far as the underlying tenets of who these people are. They’re good at their job, and they know how to compartmentalize those things. Lucy in particular is going to be really good at that because of her background and the way that she really took to undercover work as well. She knows how to section things off.”

What’s your take on Seth so far? What do you think of Lucy as a training officer? Let us know in the comments section below.

The Rookie, Tuesdays, 9/8c, ABC