‘True Lies’ Cast Tease Matthew Lillard’s Merciless (But Fun!) Assassin (PHOTOS)

If bringing in Matthew Lillard to guest star as a merciless contract assassin would make for a fun episode of any show, you’d be right. And that’s exactly what’s to come on True Lies in the March 22 episode, “Rival Companions.” The Omega Sector seeks help from his character, The Wolf, following an international catastrophe on live TV.

“I was just reacting because he was doing so much,” series star Steve Howey (who plays Harry) tells TV Insider. “He was like this flamboyant Rain Man-type psycho assassin. Harry was suspicious of him because of slaughtering all these people and then going to get a gyro — who gets a gyro?”

Meanwhile, Harry’s wife Helen (Ginger Gonzaga), new to the spy world — brought into Omega after she found out her husband’s secret life — bonds with The Wolf, whose name is Nathan. “I joked that they wrote that episode just because someone looked at my life too much, and I have just been always meeting sociopaths and thinking they’re nice people and giving them the benefit of the doubt and being like, ‘no, you just don’t see, they’ve got a lot of trauma,'” Gonzaga laughs.

“It was fun for me to play because Helen’s just like, ‘oh, I could really use a friend.’ But she also slowly kind of finds out what this person’s about and starts making different moral like, ‘huh, that’s interesting,'” she continues. “I love that in this episode, [Harry] is the only one who is correct that we should be worried about someone who’s a little off, but he just looks jealous and annoyed. So no one gives him the time of day. And it’s fun to watch him have to overcompensate so that he doesn’t look like he’s jealous. He’s just trying to speak the truth.”

According to Howey, who hopes to see Lillard back for more episodes, his guest spot came just as they needed the “energy boost” he brought to the set. “Lillard raised the bar for us. He brought so much. We were already tired. We were all kind of going through the motions on that. And he gave me a spark, and it was like, ‘OK, we gotta bring it, we gotta bring it. This guy is not pulling punches,'” he says. “He was funny. He was dramatic. It was like a spark plug to the rest of the episodes going forward.”

Scroll down for a look at The Wolf.

True Lies, Wednesdays, 10/9c, CBS