Keisha Castle-Hughes on Hana Coping With Kidnapping & Those Jess and Crosby Mentions

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for FBI: Most Wanted Season 4 Episode 5 “Chains.”]

Even off the clock, if the agents of the Fugitive Task Force see something, they have to do something. And in the latest FBI: Most Wanted, that leads to Hana (Keisha Castle-Hughes) getting kidnapped after she notices bruises around a young girl’s (Dalya Knapp’s Ollie) wrists at a rest stop.

Hana can essentially MacGyver their way out of the room in which they’re kept — Ollie’s father has been trafficking her — and save a baby in the house in the process. And the agent tells the young girl the story of what led to her getting on the FBI’s radar and Jess (Julian McMahon, who exited last season) stepping in to give her a choice: face charges or work a case. Nine years later, she’s still there. Did it ever stop hurting? Ollie asks. Not completely, Hana admits.

How will Hana be dealing with this moving forward? We turned to Castle-Hughes to find out.

How’s Hana coping after everything that happened going forward? Will we see it onscreen?

Keisha Castle-Hughes: We are going to see how she deals with it, and unsurprisingly, there is a lot of her not dealing with it, to begin with. There’s a lot of protocol — the agent would have to go to counseling and therapy and [have] a bunch of paperwork, and so we’re getting insight into those parts of the job we don’t often get to see.

So is she avoiding therapy?

She is very much in avoidance and denial, to begin with, for sure. The hope is that over time, this is going to be something that is going to help her to open up more.

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Since she’s not dealing with it, is she pushing people away or just not talking about it?

At first, we just see her not talking about it, and I think dissociating a little bit. The initial aftermath is Hana treating it as if it was a case that she worked on versus something that happened to her personally.

Who will she eventually lean on?

Hana and Ray’s [Edwin Hodge] relationship is a really solid friendship that is developing. He’s a much more open person, his character’s really shiny and bright and bubbly, and he loves to talk a lot, and I think that is helping Hana [as is] them living together. We start to see her and him open up and develop this really cool friendship beyond the workplace.

Hana opens up to Ollie about her past, which had to be tough not just because of what happened but also because it had to remind her of losing Jess. And in talking about what happened to her, she’s honest that it never stops hurting completely. Why was it important not just for Ollie to hear that but for Hana to admit that for herself?

The journey between Hana and Ollie is a really intense one in that there’s a lot of stuff in real time that Hana is dealing with by trying to help Ollie as well. And so even though she’s speaking these stories out loud to Ollie and trying to give her strength, I think Hana’s saying the stuff just as much to herself. She’s kind of fallen into a career that now she’s been in for the better part of a decade and hasn’t had a lot of time to sit and reflect and think about those things. This, in a weird way, gave her an opportunity to really kind of look at how far she’s come and to take stock of how grateful she is for where she’s landed.

CBS

Talk about filming this episode because at certain parts early on in the kidnapping, we see things from Hana’s perspective, which worked so well.

Yeah, it was such a different episode. Elizabeth Rinehart, who wrote it, really flipped it on its head. I think often when we’re doing procedurals, we get into a rhythm, and that’s the cast, the directors, the producers, the crew, as a whole, we all have ways in which we do things. It’s always exciting and invigorating for all of us, and I found that even the camera department, the grip department, we were all kind of figuring out with [director] Ken Girotti different ways to shoot this episode so that it felt different from what we usually see. And I think that it turned out really well, particularly the points where we’re seeing the world from Hana’s perspective.

And talk about filming the Hana and Heather (Amanda Corday) fight. Now I want to see more of Hana in action scenes!

I know. We had a lot of fun doing it. Ken and I did discuss the fight with our stunt coordinator, Declan [Mulvey], and we said from the get-go that the fight needed to feel as unchoreographed as it could. It needed to feel raw and messy. It wasn’t a regular set-up where it was an agent chasing a bad guy, it was coming from a real place of raw emotion, and I think we managed to pull it off. But it was a very exhausting night shooting that fight, and our stunt team is incredible. There’s no way I can take nearly any of the credit for most of it because they’re the ones that come in and make Hana look better.

I have to say I loved the Crosby (Kellan Lutz, who exited after the Season 3 premiere) mention in this episode. It’s nice to hear about him, and there’s also what he means to Hana, and this is a Hana-centric episode.

Absolutely. It was nice, in the same way, that she talks about Jess at the end. I think it’s important sometimes to remember that these characters, outside of being agents, are real people who have real relationships. Crosby and Hana were very good friends, and I like to think probably still keep in touch and are still really good mates — and what Jess meant to Hana as well. So it’s nice when we get moments where we can kind of humanize them and touch on those things. And it’s nice for the audience to feel involved in that part of their world.

FBI: Most Wanted, Tuesdays, 10/9c, CBS