John Boyd and Shantel VanSanten Go Inside Scola and Nina’s Proposal and Wedding (Exclusive)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for FBI Season 8 Episode 11 “Confetti.”]

It hasn’t been an easy road to “I do,” but Scola (John Boyd) and Nina (Shantel VanSanten) make it there in the Monday, February 23, midseason premiere of FBI. (Get a taste of some of their relationship history in our quiz that Boyd and VanSanten took.)

First, however, they have to work together to infiltrate a cartel wedding where ostensibly two organizations are uniting — only for one to turn on the other, while Nina’s trapped in the house, undercover with Maggie (Missy Peregrym), and Scola’s on the outside looking in with OA (Zeeko Zaki). In the end, Scola does help save Nina’s life, though she, of course, does a great job holding her own until it comes down to who’s armed and who isn’t. After, they sit near his desk, and he admits that he’d forgotten that “the side [of her] that edges up to the line and then completely blasts over it” looks like. “It’s the side that I fell in love with,” he adds.

Nina then reveals, “Today was the first day I thought, ‘I’m not making it out of this one.’ And I thought about you and Dougie and how through all of the pain and grief, you’d be sitting in some courtroom somewhere just dealing with our affairs. I don’t ever want to do that to you, OK? … Stuart Scola, what I’m saying is that after everything that we have been through, will you—” That’s when he stops her to get out the ring he’s had for six months and gets down on one knee. “We have to do one thing the normal way,” he explains before revealing the ring and asking, “So, will you marry me or what?” She nods, and what follows is a montage of them at the courthouse, getting married with the rest of the team and their son present.

Both the proposal and wedding did end up being similar to what the stars had pictured those moments would be for their characters, Boyd and VanSanten share in the video interview above.

She recalls the storyline from her FBI: Most Wanted days, when Nina told her father that she didn’t plan on marrying Scola, that she was happy with how things were. “I had thought about it and thought she doesn’t need that. She definitely is going to push back and never get married. And then I got a call that we were getting married, so I had to think about it,” VanSanten says. “When I thought about Nina and Scola’s wedding, it was always going to be simple, understated, and if anything, out of necessity because it isn’t this grand gesture of love that they’ve ever needed. It’s always been in the quiet moments where we’ve seen them connect as their characters and in truth. So I felt it was really perfect and can stand the test of time, isn’t some big ordeal with a puffy gown.”

Adds Boyd, “The place that I came from, too, was hoping that it would be true to them and true to them would be coming from a necessity or a reason.” One possibility in his mind? The FBI is an agency where spouses are guaranteed to stay together if one is transferred. “The way that they figured out the reason that the two decide to do it was beautiful to me. And yeah, it was just important. I think what I saw was that it came and spoke to their journey, that it came out of that.”

While the office may not be the most romantic of places, it made sense for Scolina. “It’s a place where you heard us speak truth,” VanSanten points out. “It just felt perfectly imperfect. And that’s something that I would rather normalize through storytelling and through characters is not this fairytale of perfection, but instead human realness. And they both just got really vulnerable and then somebody took over my proposal and it was light and also heavy.”

What also matters is what is said and what that scene means for them. “It has repair as a couple. It has vulnerability. That’s where the decision is made that it’s time to do this,” says Boyd. “The wedding scene, it’s so sweet, it’s great, but it’s the cherry on top. The proposal scene is the thing that really tells their whole story.”

When it came time for the wedding itself, what was important for showrunner Mike Weiss was it be “tastefully emotional,” he tells us. “It feels very them. I think the wedding feels very FBI, but I think Scola’s proposal feels very them in a really nice way.”

He continues, “They’re both such great actors and John has such a fun kind of syncopated, surprising rhythm to the way he delivers dialogue, the way he thinks, and I think that the engagement plays into that.”

It is an emotional scene, but the stars also had fun behind the scenes, with Shantel VanSanten eager to share the story of how they accidentally had the wrong rings during the first take. “I died of laughter,” trying to figure out which of his fingers to put the diamond ring on, she shares. “It was just this light, fun moment that maybe broke up whatever sort of nerves were in the room.”

They also loved having everyone there. “Having the whole cast there, making all my castmates sit there and watch me get married was really fun for me. And the heckling. The heckling from the crowd, it was pretty fun,” Boyd says.

As for the vows that we didn’t hear, “I think they were simple,” says VanSanten. “I don’t think there needs to be some speech about who each other is, but instead just the promise that they were really making to one another. I like that the audience only caught the tail end of it and that there is some mystery to what else would they have said. And I want to say to that, go watch their story because so much has been said along the way that the foundation of these characters really has been spoken to and it was just like the perfect moment.”

Boyd agrees, adding, “I don’t think about the vows because when you love the person that you work with, when you choose to spend your life with the person, that you work alongside with, the promise is already there. The vow has been in the case, the vow is in how we work together.”

Watch the full video interview above for much more from John Boyd and Shantel VanSanten about this episode’s big Scolina moments.

What did you think of Scola and Nina’s proposal and wedding? Let us know in the comments section below.

FBI, Mondays, 9/8c, CBS