‘The Rookie’ Star Jenna Dewan on Having Real-Life Fiancé Steve Kazee Play Her Abusive Ex and Touring With ‘Idol’ Janet Jackson

SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from “The Mickey,” the Season 7, Episode 7 of ABC’s “The Rookie.”

Jenna Dewan never expected to stick around on “The Rookie.” But after Dewan signed on to the ABC police procedural for a multi-episode arc in 2021, the actress’ fun-loving firefighter Bailey Nune immediately made an impression by arriving at protagonist John Nolan’s (Nathan Fillion) front door wearing only a bath towel. (She had accidentally locked herself out of the neighboring property that she was house-sitting.)

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For Dewan, the opportunity to play Fillion’s potential new love interest in the Season 3 finale felt, at most, like a welcome respite from the then-raging pandemic. But once creator Alexi Hawley noticed an immediate spark between Nolan and Bailey, he decided to promote Dewan to series regular in Season 4. Since then, Bailey’s storyline has evolved into a woman realizing that she can’t outrun her traumatic past.

Midway through Season 4, Bailey’s abusive husband, Jason (Steve Kazee — Dewan’s real-life fiancé), who was convicted of embezzlement, got out of prison. Jason tracked Bailey down in Los Angeles, throwing her entire relationship with Nolan — then unaware of her marriage — into question. After Jason admitted to planting cocaine in Bailey’s car in an act of retaliation against her, he cut a deal with the DA to act as an informant inside the criminal organization where he was laundering money. But his failure to uphold his end of that deal sent him back behind bars.

In the Season 6 finale, just as Nolan and Bailey began to settle into married life, Jason broke out of prison with his accomplice, Oscar Hutchinson (Matthew Glave). Following an elaborate ruse to make Nolan and Bailey believe that he’d fled the city, in Episode 5, Jason tracked down Bailey at work, hit her with his stolen car and kidnapped her. However, Bailey was able to fight back, breaking Jason’s arm and forcing him to crash the vehicle. Jason eventually met his demise at the hands of Malvado (Jimmy Gonzales), a hitman whom Bailey had communicated with on a burner phone. And in this week’s episode, while Nolan struggles with whether he can forgive Bailey for effectively conspiring with Malvado to kill Jason, Bailey finally opens up to a stranger about the extent of the abuse she suffered.

Below, Dewan opens up about playing out her character’s harrowing abuse storyline with significant other Kazee, how opening up about Jason will allow Bailey to move on — and what she personally learned from working for Janet Jackson (whom she still considers a close friend) at the turn of the 21st century.

Interestingly enough, you aren’t the first actor I’ve talked to who has enlisted their real-life partner to play their abusive ex on TV. Jennifer Love Hewitt recently told Variety that working with her real-life husband on “9-1-1” actually allowed them to feel safe enough to go deeper into their characters’ storyline. Was that also your experience with Steve?

I’ve always been a really big fan of his talent. So when Alexi had this great idea, I was immediately excited. He’s such a good actor that I felt we would be able to push each other and really go to places that you feel safer to go to when it’s someone you trust and you’re going home with. It just feels as if you’re going to unlock new sides to your relationship. It’s also fun to do something outside the box and different in your relationship in general. [There’s] nothing like going through the daily motions of parenting 24/7 at home and then getting to go and play these really extreme moments together.

In our first scene, we had a real moment of, ‘Oh, thank God, we work well together!’ We wouldn’t have known that until ‘The Rookie.’ I think it was fun for him to play a really bad guy — just truly, outright bad — and it was fun for me to be able to unleash on him. They’d say ‘cut!’ and we’d immediately look at each other and start laughing, like, ‘What are we doing?’ We had the ending fight in the fifth episode where Jason dies. That episode was really surreal, because we had just had [our daughter] Rhiannon. So we were thrust into this crazy car fight — beating each other up, throwing each other around, yelling at each other — all the while our newborn was in the trailer, and I was going back and forth to breastfeed. We had every color on the emotional spectrum together.

Let’s talk about that fight scene at the end of Episode 5: Bailey was dragged around like a ragdoll at first, but her quick thinking allows her to get the upper hand as Jason spirals out of control. What kind of story did you want to tell through that sequence?

I totally agree. She was being dragged around, and I feel like it was a nice representation of the emotional arc that Bailey is going through when it comes to domestic violence and this ex-husband. She had to find her own way to fight back against it, because for so many years in this situation, she was always the victim and the one that’s having to take it. So, finally, she’s speaking up to him and telling him he’s Sideshow Bob — all these things that you feel nervous to say to somebody who is physically, emotionally and verbally abusive. You could see that she finally got to that point where she says, ‘I don’t care anymore. I am done with this,’ and breaks [his] arm and punches him. She finally got to her breaking point, found her power and was ending the cycle.

As you began to flesh out this storyline with Alexi over the years, what kinds of conversations did you have with other victims of domestic violence? How did you want to ground Bailey’s own experience of abuse?

Through speaking to people I’ve known in my life, people that have dealt with domestic violence in different ways, I do hear very often a refrain that even [if] the threat is controlled or minimized, you feel the PTSD of that energy interacting in your life. So it’s still there, and because you have the patterning of it, there’s a lot of work that goes into counteracting that pattern. I think [with] Bailey, through the season, you see that: ‘Am I safe here? Oh, I am safe here. OK, that’s gone.’ However, the memory of those feelings are still there. I think that the moral dilemma that she faced — and faces — hopefully is understood in the sense of, if you’ve had a threat that has been around for years upon years, you never feel free of that; it’s really difficult to ignore. Partly where I found empathy for Bailey was that feeling of, you want it to be done so badly, you want to feel free and you want your safety. I think that’s a really difficult thing for her to contend with.

In this week’s episode, Bailey befriends Diana, a fellow victim of domestic abuse who runs a local women’s shelter. What is Bailey able to get out of finally being able to open up about Jason to this woman?

I think Diana came into her life for a reason: to mirror her own sensitivities and her own blind spots. When it comes to your healing, I think so many times you go through trauma and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m better. That was then, but I’m good now.’ I think Diana represented the example of: You’re living with it and you’re bearing it down, but you need to realize how much this affected you, and that it’s okay to acknowledge that. I think in letting her guard down, Bailey begins the healing process. I think that is continual; I don’t think it’s just one-and-done.

At one point in the episode, Bailey confesses to Diana that she had a hard time labelling what Jason put her through as abuse, because she didn’t look like a typical victim. She didn’t have any black eyes or broken bones, so she didn’t feel like — or want to be seen as — a victim.

I thought that was really an incredible moment of writing, because it’s true. We all have these opinions of what things should look like or should be in order to categorize it as something, and I even learned at that moment, violence, abuse and domestic abuse looks different for everyone. Just because it’s not the stereotypical black eye or injury — it doesn’t have to get to that point necessarily, or those things don’t need to happen, for it to be domestic abuse.

That was a really interesting moment for the audience to see, ‘Oh, it’s how someone’s acting towards me and how that looks. It can be manipulative; it can be covert.’ That’s something I’ve seen in my own life. I felt like there was freedom for Bailey to hear that, to express that. There was a release of shame that happens when you are a victim of abuse — that you feel like you’re doing something wrong — and to have Diana mirror that for her made her feel like, ‘OK, I’m not alone in this.’

And I think you’re right. I don’t think she ever wants to be seen as a victim. But at the end of the day, she was a victim; she is a victim. So accepting that was a huge step. It’s almost like, what you resist persists, so she finally goes, ‘OK, fine. You’re right. I was a victim.’ And then she’s able to move on.

Nolan has been unable to help Bailey heal, largely because he still does not know the full extent of what Jason did to her, but Bailey seems ready to come clean to him in an attempt to move on and rebuild the sense of trust between them. What do Nolan and Bailey see in each other that makes them want to make their relationship work?

For Bailey, Nolan feels like a safe place for her to be vulnerable and to be herself. Nolan feels like Bailey is someone that’s always bringing him into new experiences. They keep each other on their toes at the same time as there’s an understanding. When two people have that level of danger in their jobs, it’s hard for anyone else to acknowledge and experience that unless you’re in it. So there’s a lot of commonality with that, and I think he gets a kick out of her. Bailey is a whole, full-fledged powerful woman in her own right, and I think that’s really seductive, and they have great chemistry together. I also think that Nolan being such a safe place and being able to hold her emotions and her big feelings encourages her to express herself more, be funny and playful with him. I always say he’s like one big healing in every way to Bailey.

Before the threat of Jason re-entered their lives, Nolan and Bailey were considering expanding their family by adopting a child. Will they resume those talks this season? What does their relationship look like going forward?

Now where they’re at with the family of it all is realizing, especially recovering from Jason and Malvado, there is a moment of, ‘Our lives are really not conducive to bringing a child in as it is right now. Both of our lives are at risk.’ It’s not like one person’s not home and has this extreme job. We both have extreme jobs, and I think there’s an understanding that it might not be the right time for us to address that until we can create a little more stability in our own lives. I think that maturity is a cool moment between Nolan and Bailey. So it’s definitely still on the table, and I think they both want it. It’s just timing.

Will Bailey have to deal with any legal consequences for her actions later in the season?

Yes and no. Of course, there are the moral complexities of that situation — being married to a cop and all of that is complex, at best. But there are also some other factors that present themselves that explain certain things a little bit more, so it appears one way but then you realize there’s more to the story.

“The Rookie” has blown up in recent years on TikTok, so the demographic of the show’s fans has unexpectedly begun to skew a little younger. What does your 11-year-old daughter, Everly, think about your work on the show? Does she have the acting bug like her parents, or is she more of a dancer? [Dewan shares Everly with her first husband, Channing Tatum, whom she met on the set of their film “Step Up.”]

She definitely is more of the dancer side of us. She is a competitive Irish dancer, so a totally different way than I went, but [she’s] still in the ballrooms of Marriotts all around the world competing. She loves it; she’s super into it.

And it’s funny — she’d seen an episode or two of ‘The Rookie’ in the past, but it was always a little bit scary for her. However, recently she said, ‘Mom, I really want to watch “The Rookie.”‘ I think I have some of the boys in her sixth-grade class to thank, because they’re coming to school saying how good it is. So she’s in love with the show now. Every night she’s like, ‘Can we watch a new “Rookie”?’ So we’ve gotten to the point now where my daughter can officially watch some of the things that I do and really like it. She watched the episode with Steve and I recently, and she was just like, ‘Oh my gosh, that was so intense! I can’t believe that’s you guys!’ It’s cool to be able to share it with her.

Your “Smooth Criminal” dance with co-star Mekia Cox last season was viewed over 39.2 million times and got over 3.8 million likes on TikTok. The dance was fantastic, but the connection you have is even cooler: You and Mekia share the distinction of being former back-up dancers for a Jackson — Mekia danced for Michael, you danced for Janet. How did that dance come about?

First of all, yes, what irony that we both danced for a Jackson. We couldn’t get over that when we put that together, when we first started working together. I just saw that dance on my TikTok. I saw it as one of the recommended videos, and I loved it. ‘Smooth Criminal’ is one of my absolute favorite videos, so I sent it to her and I said, ‘Should we do this? I know I’m six months pregnant, but I’ll try my hardest to keep up.’ She’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, we should do it!’ So I definitely pulled probably four muscles in my uterus doing that dance, but we had a blast.

We want to find one to do together again. But it’s about, when are we filming the same scenes together? When are we on set together? It takes a minute to learn it and all that stuff. But we had so much fun and we laughed so hard. We were like, ‘This is the best moment to have this recorded.’

You’ve credited Janet with helping to launch your career 25 years ago, and you reunited with her on stage in 2017 at the Hollywood Bowl. When you reflect back on your experience of working for her, what stands out to you? What did you learn from her?

I do credit Janet, because Janet was my first dream come true — a true vision board moment that actually happened. All I wanted was to dance for her. I was picked to be in her [‘Doesn’t Really Matter’] video, and then she personally came up to me and asked me if I wanted to go on tour. I remember I almost passed out, and I said yes. I really learned from her how to be a leader, how to do it with grace and love, and how to work with others and bring it together in a unified way. She really understands what it’s like to be a team player, and she keeps her dancers close to her. She’s good to the people she works for. She has the same people around her she’s had for a million years. She is so beloved — and it’s because she treats people really well.

More than anything, I saw how far that can reach and how you feel in her presence. And then when you finish her tour and you work with other artists, you realize that that’s not the norm. So you start to realize that being a good leader goes a long way. I do think that impacted me growing up. I was 19 to 21 when I worked with her, so that really impacted my life, and it was just such an incredible experience to tour the world with your idol, who also is the sweetest, kindest human in the world and a force on stage. It gave me confidence to really go after everything I want in life.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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