'FBI: Most Wanted' Star Reveals Real-Life Inspiration Behind Nina and Scola

Shantel VanSanten and John Boyd as Nina and Scola

FBI's favorite cross-show couple is finally back on screen together for a double dose of domestic bliss, sort of. When FBI: Most Wanted took a trip home with Nina (Shantel VanSanten) and Scola (John Boyd) last week, things were not exactly blissful. Nina had gone a little too hard on the parenting, overcompensating for her own rough childhood. Scola, meanwhile, just wished their young son Dougie had a few less things for him to trip over on his way to bed. They ended the episode by falling into bed together after working things out, but this week, that work is becoming literal. On the new episode of FBI titled "Best Laid Plans,' Nina and Scola will go undercover as a married couple in the diamond game and they'll come face to face with what it actually means to be parents who are also FBI agents. In preparation for their onscreen reunion, Boyd and VanSanten actually found a couple of real-life married FBI agents and picked their brains, and VanSanten shared a few of the insights—and more—in an interview with Parade.

Related: How 'FBI: Most Wanted' Began Its 2-Show Crossover With 'FBI

One of VanSanten's biggest questions was to the wife, who had given birth to a son right before joining a drug task force in which she was the only woman.

"I asked her, 'Can you tell me the truth—can you tell me if you ever thought about quitting after you had your son?'' she told Parade. "Because the expectation is that the woman takes the step back in society, and I think we're on the precipice of some changes around that, and I want Nina and Scola's relationship to be a part of changing minds. Her answer really rang true for me, as Nina. She said, 'Having a son means I have more of a responsibility and obligation to make this world a better place for him and his future, and that was my driving motivation.'"

VanSanten explained that according to this couple, it all comes down to trust. "You have to be so confident in your abilities and trust yourself and the partners you have around you that you're gonna come home," she said. "But obviously there's risk everywhere in life. There's risk every time we get in a car. You can't escape risk. All [Nina] can do is trust in her abilities and know why she's doing what she's doing. It's for her son, to give him a better world. I thought that was such a beautiful answer and something that I really now integrate into the fabric of who and what Nina is."

Related: Everything to Know About 'FBI: Most Wanted' Season 5

Read on for the rest of VanSanten's interview.

How much of Nina and Scola's private life did you have in your head as they reunited on screen?

I knew the baby was old enough that Nina felt comfortable going back to work and if I'm telling the truth, I developed a lot of what Nina's months off of the job—this is me taking my own personal creative liberty—and I decided that it was really difficult and she had had a really difficult postpartum, and that she was ready to get back to work because breastfeeding wasn't easy for her and it just didn't work out well. And all of those different failures have led up to this scene [last week] where we see her overcompensating, not just because of her childhood and the lack of having a mother from such a young age, but also just the complications for her around pregnancy and the baby and the parts of motherhood that she felt she was missing out on. I do a lot of backstory work that is important to me as an actor because it informs a deeper story that the audience may not get to see.

The way Nina had refused to talk about life at home all season felt like it was leading somewhere, so how did you feel when you got to see where it was going?

I was a little nervous that we started off in a challenging spot [where] it wasn't like, the audience got to see us super lovey-dovey from the beginning, but I also I really commend our writers for always telling the truth as well. They've overcome a lot, Nina and Scola, and to see them still overcoming the day-to-day challenges of parenting and, you know, doing the job and living together, and then repair that in the end and come together emotionally and vulnerably was really honest and beautiful. We often, in partnerships, fight about the toothpaste on the mirror, or the dishes in the sink or the toilet seat left up when really it's not about that. And I think that's kind of what we got to see with these two scenes was the normalcy of a partnership and the way that they kind of repair.

So do you think we'll continue to see scenes like this as their relationship continues?

I think it's ongoing. Nothing is ever just, "Okay, sorry, moving on." Like, this is a deep wound for Nina that I can imagine comes up [often]. The loss of her mother is something that the writers and I have talked about since the beginning. This is a loss of a mother to a drug overdose when Nina was five. This is the reason, as she says in the episode, she wears the badge that she fights for justice. It's a big motivating factor, but also a very deep wound that is not just healed because she cleans out the closet and organizes. It's a work in progress. We all are.

The last episode of Most Wanted involved a case that ended up being about a determined mother, and Maggie (Missy Peregrym) is dealing with her own views of motherhood on FBI. Is it surprising to you how much of this franchise has turned out to be about working mothers?

Women make up a little bit more than half of the population and a lot of women are mothers, whether they've had their own, whether they've adopted whether they've taken on the responsibility of somebody else's child. Motherhood looks so different than ever before in our in our modern day, and I think it's important to tell the different stories, to tell the stories in an honest way. I myself am not a mother. I haven't had a child of my own. I have so many friends who are. I'm a dog mom, I'm an aunt, I'm a godmother. I'm all of these things. But so many of my friends confide in me, because I'm a safe space. I'm not going to judge. I wouldn't know what it's like so they're able to really share and I use and infuse so many of those stories and that honesty and vulnerability that they bring to me into Nina, because they're the untold stories of the moms who feel like they can tell only one safe person, they can whisper "This is hard." "I feel like I'm failing," or "I couldn't breastfeed, does this mean I failed my child?"

The really tough stuff is what I'm interested in sharing with the world, even if it means that it makes Nina unlikable, even if she's not perfect. I'm not scared of that because the human stories are the real stories and they're the ones that I want to tell so that when a mother watches she feels less alone.

Did the FBI couple you talked to explain how they handled some of the arguments Nina and Scola have gotten into? What else did you learn from them?

They talked a lot about how they would trade off. Like if one was taking on a really difficult job that took them away for a little while, that the other one would take on stuff that was a little less risk or more local, like a low-key position. They talked a lot about being each other's support system and having a really strong network around them that could help them with their kid, because they would get a call on Easter, you know, and one would have to go here and the next day the other person has to leave on a case and just how you have to have this strong network of support. They also talked about how in the FBI, it's one of the only agencies that considers the couples and won't transfer them away from each other. They keep them together.

How does this experience of working together as parents with a baby at home change things going forward for Nina and Scola?

I think like we learned because of the FBI episode, there's a new rule and the rule is that one of us is always going to come home and to the best of our abilities and communicate with one another. That's going to be the household rule, until the writers decided to change that. For now, that's our household rule. And number two rule has to be Nina is always right, and number three, [Scola] always has to apologize first. Obviously, all in jest, but it's been really rewarding to watch these two characters…I think back at how much they overcome and kind of where they started by like, going out on a date and him ghosting Nina to an unplanned pregnancy to complications to being shot, to almost losing the baby to having it. They've been through a lot and I think that they will continue to, and through those challenges, just get stronger and stronger.

So there are more crossovers in store?

What's funny is we're on two different shows, but not a lot of people know that I'm just in the basement. The Fugitive Task Force muster room is just in the basement of the same building. I would like to think that some days, they can take a car ride to work together. Maybe they're on the seventh or eighth floor, but we're in the same building. I have to tell my family, "Guys, we're in the same building, we can raise a baby together." We're on different shows on the same night, but different times, in the same building in the same household. I think there's a lot of opportunity for some more crossovers and to see this couple grow. These shows are really about the cases, but in small amounts, we get to see their personal lives, and it allows the audience to relate to them more and see where they're really coming from sometimes.

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