‘Bosch: Legacy’: Titus Welliver Reveals If He’ll Appear in Spinoff & Teases ‘Personal Case’ in Season 3

Preview
Titus Welliver‘s career includes many memorable roles in series such as Lost, Deadwood, and Sons of Anarchy, but his most memorable and long-running role has been Harry Bosch, the hero of the TV shows based on Michael Connelly‘s books. The 63-year-old has portrayed Harry from 2012 to 2025, first as an LAPD detective in Bosch and then as a private eye in Bosch: Legacy.
The veteran actor talks frankly about his devotion to Harry and his fans, what’s upcoming this season, and his next appearances in the Bosch firmament in the spinoff featuring L.A. Cold Case detective Renee Ballard, played by Maggie Q.
Let’s talk about the third and final season of Legacy. What’s new?
We have marvelous guest actors, some new and some returning. The central focus of the season is the book Desert Star, a recent [Connelly] book and one of my favorites. We’ll also get the introduction of the Ballard character. [Maggie Q] and I had a wonderful time together. And I feel like that too will be a great success.
How do they first connect this season?
At the end of this season she’s working on a cold case that Harry’s been obsessed with for years. It was about three young Asian women, whose photos he kept on his desk. That’s how Bosch and Ballard intersect.
Does Harry appear in Ballard’s first season?
I did a few episodes, cameos for a better word, which were a lot of fun.
What are the main Legacy stories this season?
There’s one about an Irish woman (Orla Broady) who contacts Bosch because her daughter and son-in-law and her two grandchildren have vanished; their vehicle is found at the Mexican border with no trace of the family. As that processes, the story get very, very dark. This is exactly the kind of work that Bosch did when he was a cop and he’s trapped back in it. He enlists the aid of a sheriff down there, and when it’s apparent that there is serious foul play, he enlists the help of one of his former Special Forces unit members.
Does he work closely with the distraught Irish woman?
He forges a relationship with her and his empathy is very clear. The level of anger and intensity that this case provokes in Bosch is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. With the exception of when he went in to interrogate Dockweiler —the man who tried to bury his daughter Maddie (Madison Lintz) alive — with a pen. But Bosch is not a murderer, though this missing family case pushes him out of a shape in a very big way.
That brings me to a personal case that could really hurt Bosch.
Yes, there’s a deeply personal case that places him at odds with the LAPD. Dockweiler has been killed in custody. At the very end of last season’s finale, Maddie took a phone call in which a man says, “Tell your dad I took care it.” She began thinking, “My father crossed the line,” as does the LAPD as Bosch becomes part of an internal investigation concerning a character resurfacing from several seasons ago. Preston Borders (Chris Browning) was a murderer, but there was some malfeasance on the part of Chief Irving (the late Lance Reddick) on the case and it was line that Bosch does not cross.
Harry’s former LAPD colleague Jimmy Robertson (Paul Calderon) is put in charge of that new investigation. Is that good or bad?
Well, Jimmy says, “I get it, but murder? That’s not Bosch.” But he’s still in charge of that investigation. He has a new younger partner, and there’s a kind of dance going on.
Maddie isn’t only unsure about whether her dad was involved in that revenge Dockweiller killing, but she’s also discovered that Harry, while a Marine, could have been involved in a war crime in Afghanistan. Is there stress between father and daughter this season?
Yes,, there is tension and doubt. At a funeral for one of Bosch’s former unit members, one tells a story from their time in Afghanistan. It’s very upsetting to Maddie. It creates doubt in her: ‘Does my dad lurk in that kind of abyss?’ Maddie has a lot going on, she’s been assigned to a very high-risk unit in LAPD. Also, Honey Chandler (Mimi Rogers) is the new District Attorney, and with the light being shone upon him, that creates tension between them as well.
After all these years playing this character, how would you describe Harry Bosch?
What’s great about Bosch is that he’s not a guy like most people. Bosch is a bull that carries around his own china shop. He’s got a problem with authority even when he’s a cop and does not play well with the higher-ups in LAPD. He’s obsessed and relentless in obtaining justice for crime victims, and bureaucracy and lazy or poor police work are the bane of his existence. That all goes back to the murder of his mother, who was a sex worker and her case was not really pursued. To him, everybody counts or nobody counts. And that’s what, for a decade on our shows, has placed him at odds with people. But does he possess this kind of unbridled, primordial instinct to do things that he’s had taken an oath to not do as a police officer?
Do you think Harry Bosch should have gone back to work as a police officer?
Well one day, after a scene I said, ‘I feel like a cop again. I feel like Harry is doing that work again,’ and that prompted the discussion of, ‘Let’s get Harry back on the job.’
But that doesn’t happen in this final season.
No, there’s no time. But I will say that from the moment I was cast until the last day of work, I felt deeply protective of the character that Michael Connolly created in the books. It’s without a doubt the most rewarding and fulfilling role I’ve had in my career thus far. Michael Connelly said to me, ‘Is there anything you want to change about the character?’ And I said, ‘It ain’t broke. No need to fix it.’ The investment in that character for me has been profound and staggeringly rewarding. And I deeply miss that.
So both sad and yet happy with what you’ve done with Bosch?
I can honestly say there was never a day that I would report for work that I didn’t have a smile on my face, and that I didn’t feel blessed and filled with immense gratitude to be able to go to work with these people. I’ve always felt that the character, and certainly in the books, the older this character gets, the more interesting [he becomes], because Bosch doesn’t necessarily evolve in the way that some characters do. He evolves in a different way. But the older that he gets and the more vulnerable, he becomes more dangerous. And we really tapped into that with this third and final season of Legacy. I think we penetrate a membrane that the audience has always had questions about.
Any last thoughts on Legacy’s last season?
There’s a lot of stuff that really unfolds that I think makes this, of the three Legacy seasons, probably the most powerful. It will offer lots of sustenance to our fans.
Bosch: Legacy, Season 3 Premiere, Thursday, March 27, Prime Video
–Reporting by Ileane Rudolph
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