Gary Cole on Parker’s Father’s Death, Carla Relationship, More (Exclusive)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the NCIS Season 22 finale “Nexus.”]

Uh-oh, Carla Marino (Rebecca De Mornay) just made Alden Parker (Gary Cole) very angry. Sure, it’s not definitively revealed that she’s the one behind that shocking death at the end of the NCIS Season 22 finale, but it’s obvious who did it.

Parker was forced to cross paths with his longtime nemesis when the mob boss claimed to have intel to help them take down the Nexus cartel, only for a “meeting” with the supposed new leader to reveal that she was now in charge and had her man, posing as an FBI agent, drive Parker to the place where her son was killed in a car accident 20 years earlier. He was where he was because he’d run away after Parker revealed she was a criminal to him, so she blames him. But while she holds a gun to him, killing him would be too easy. Instead, she knocks him out … and then when he gets home later, he finds his father (Francis X. McCarthy), dead, in his apartment.

Below, Gary Cole reacts to that shocking finale ending, speculates about how Parker will be doing in Season 23, and more. (Plus, read a deep dive into the finale and what’s ahead with executive producer Steven D. Binder here.)

What was your reaction to Parker’s father being killed off in the way he is?

Gary Cole: Nobody got the script until I guess maybe a couple weeks before we shot that. I thought it was certainly a dynamic ending. As an actor, selfishly, I was a little bit sad because I really like the actor who plays my father and I like doing those scenes, but I thought it was certainly a surprise, which I think was good for us, and hopefully, into the next season, will lead to some very probably dark places, which I think is not a bad thing either.

Talk about filming that last scene and playing Parker’s rage and grief and sadness and everything he’s feeling.

I was a little intimidated when I saw the scene because I realized a lot of things had to happen in a very short amount of time. First, obviously the discovery, which is beyond shocking because it’s one thing to discover somebody dead, it’s another thing to discover somebody murdered. Then quickly, there was a realization, at least in his mind, that he knew who was responsible for it and so there had to be some kind of a transition and I think we found that it was great the way Jose [Clemente Hernandez] who directed it, staged it, that there was, and also the way it was actually laid out in the script, that he quickly goes from shocking grief to probably just vengeful rage in the span of a few minutes, which that was intimidating to me, but I haven’t seen it. I won’t watch it, but hopefully we got there.

You definitely did. Do you think Parker is in the state of mind where he can think with his badge versus what he wants to do as a grieving son?

Well, I think that’s an answer that’s going to be solved in the writers’ room. I think that it is possible that as much as he would like to be professional about it, there’s no way it cannot be personal. And the other thing that isn’t a slam dunk is everything points to what we think is who did this, but we don’t know. But I think Parker right now, certainly in that moment was pretty positive about how he felt, who was responsible for the death of his father. I haven’t been in communication with the writers. I don’t know at what stage they’re at in terms of planning stories or if anything has even been written yet. But I think it would be interesting to explore the fact that it is going to be personal and it might be personal to the point where he goes over the line possibly and doesn’t behave as a cop but behaves more as a son. But we’ll see. That’s going to be in their ballpark, but whatever they come up with, I’ll try to deliver the mail.

I actually just spoke to Steven D. Binder and he said that Parker is going to be a man on fire. Based on what you know about Parker, having played him for years now, what do you think that looks like?

I think he’s kind of at least underneath on fire a little bit, as Steve suggests, but this has to make that more overt in him. I’m hoping, and I think that the writers have always been good about having the consequences of what they write linger past the point at which they occur, like finales. It’s going to be difficult for him to be possibly as light and — It’s going to be difficult for him to be waltzing in with boxes of pastry talking about what’s his favorite donut after this. But I don’t know. When you’re in an environment like doing the show, it’s a lot of material and it’s a lot of time elapsed and it’s a lot of episodes, so things have to play out in a natural way and no one can be totally dark all the time and yet it can’t be ignored at the same time, if that makes sense.

Before that, Palmer (Brian Dietzen) found something in Parker’s mom’s original death certificate that didn’t add up. Parker doesn’t know this yet, but do you have a theory about that?

Well, the only theory that makes any sense to me possibly, but I haven’t spoken to the writers or anything like that, [is] I wonder if his father is involved in that discrepancy because he doesn’t seem to want to talk about the mother at all really in any specific way. But I don’t know. I really don’t know. But it’s funny because somebody said, I don’t know who mentioned this, but I think it might’ve been Rebecca, she said, “So what happens to you at the beginning of next season? Do we start the season with you in a mental hospital?” Because on top of this, now he gets news of — but that’s why I’m not a writer, so I just have to react to whatever they’re coming up with.

Sonja Flemming / CBS

Yeah, because then there’s also the Lily of it, because Parker has been through it this season.

It goes full circle with all these characters and that’s what I mean when you’re in this environment and you bring a season to a close and you want to leave people on the edge because that’s kind of the format, you go through extremes and so you have to try and it’s just a different situation for writers because they’re not starting with A and getting it to Z like you would do a movie and that’s all known upfront going in. They’re doing chunks of time and then there’s a pause and then they have to look back at what happened and try to assemble the pieces again. It’s a different process, so sometimes it’s you don’t know and you don’t know until the very last minute where things are going to lead.

Before that tragic ending, there was that great to watch, not so much for Parker, dinner with Carla just inviting herself in and staying with him and his father. How was filming that?

That was great. I loved working with Rebecca and Francis. It was a situation obviously that Parker was beyond uncomfortable. I mean, it was strangely just dangerous and violating and all kinds of things, and yet of course his father is literally charmed beyond belief by this beautiful woman that shows up at the door and Parker has to kind of fade into the couch and try to make the best of the evening and then hopefully have it end soon. It was a lot of fun to do. It was a well-written scene, well directed, and those two actors, I love working with both of them.

Did Parker think Carla would really kill him when she had him on his knees gun on him?

Sure. Whatever’s going on between them or whatever had gone on between them — and that’s another thing, we don’t really know — one thing he is certain of is how lethal she is or can be. I don’t think he questions that at all in that sense. As a law enforcement officer, he’s not naive about that at all. They’re not revealing what kind of other personal connection the two of them had. We don’t really know that and I don’t know that we’ll ever know that. It’s just interesting to play that they have some kind of connection even though they’re on both sides of the spectrum in terms of right and wrong or however you want to put that up there.

Going back to the Lily of it, because Parker says he’s still looking into that at this point, does he have any idea what that whole thing was about with why he saw her?

I don’t think he knows why. It was an interesting piece of information that’s discovered is that this person seems to have witnessed what happened to his mother, but he didn’t know. He was not aware of that, certainly, at the time. So I don’t really know, and that’s another question I think that the writers — on one level, it’s fun because they don’t have to supply an answer immediately. They can have occurrences and they can have things happen, which even they may at the time not know what the payoff may be. I mean, they’re going to have to pay it off at some point. I would assume they will. That’ll depend on the gods of TV and their schedule though.

Besides the fallout of Parker’s father’s death, what are you hoping to explore with Parker next season?

I’ve always been an actor that’s basically really just instinctive. I don’t really ponder things before they’re in front of me because It really is the writers’ room that drives that and I react to it. Sometimes the writers talk to me, I’m thinking about doing this and I’m thinking about doing that, and I’ll say, that’s great, and what ifs? But for the most part, I’m certainly not a writer and I certainly don’t come up with any kind of story points or anything like that. To know what I’m going to explore doesn’t have anything to do with me until I have material. The way we work is you’re never going to see that material until really a few weeks before you’re going to execute it. So I don’t spend my time trying to foresee what that’s going to be because to me, playing a character for this long is about being specific with moments. Literally, to me, I take it as line by line, scene by scene, show by show, and that’ll turn into an arc, but that’s more out of my hands than the writers’ hands, I feel. That’s how I look at it.

NCIS, Season 23, TBA, CBS