While On Call is heavily focused on Traci Harmon and her new rookie Alex Diaz, there is some focus on those higher up in the precinct. Lori Loughlin and Eriq La Salle tease their characters in the new cop drama.
On Call brings us into the thick of it rather quickly. We don’t just get to see what it’s like for the boots on the ground. We also get a look at how Lieutenant Bishop (Lori Loughlin) and Sergeant LasMan (Eriq La Salle) make decisions and search for answers.
In our exclusive interview, we discussed the characters, teasing some of the things to come toward the end of the season. All eight episodes of On Call arrive tomorrow, Thursday, Jan. 9, and this is not a series you’ll want to overlook.
Lori Loughlin talks a woman in power with heart in On Call
Far too often, we see the women in power as the strict, overbearing people. They don’t have anything nice to say about others, and they are especially hard on the other women working underneath them. That’s not the case for Lori Loughlin’s Lieutenant Bishop, and it’s something that I wanted to bring up. Was that important for Loughlin to show on the screen?
“Absolutely…She’s in charge of a lot the safety of a lot of people, so of course, there is that maternal or heart element that comes into it. You wantto make sure everyone goes home to their families at the end of the day.”
The first episode sees the precinct go through something different and emotional. It would be normal for a TV show to have a female lieutenant tell the others to suck it up and get back to work. That’s not what happens between Bishop and Harmon, though, and I asked Loughlin to talk about that.
“Bishop and Harmon go toe-to-toe a lot in the series, but at the end of the day, I think Bishop has a lot of respect for Harmon. I think Harmon is a good cop, and I think Bishop knows it. She just pushes her to be the best that she can be in all aspects of her life.”
Eriq La Salle teases the relationship development for Sergeant Lasman in On Call
When talking to La Salle, we talked about how Harmon and Lasman don’t always get along. It seems like Lasman is trying to make life for Harmon difficult, but is that really the case?
“It’s exploring relationships that are very complicated, particularly when you may want the same thing, but maybe you go about it in different ways…He has his point of view; she has her point of view. The thing I love the most about that relationship is actually towards the end of the season when you start realizing that there are more similarities. They come to a place where they sort of discover something.”
La Salle did tease something that happens toward the end of the season, and it’s not something that we could get into—trust me, I wanted to! However, I did want to know if he knew all about the twist at the end, or if he had to change the way he played his character later.
“Tim [Walsh]…told me ‘there’s some stuff coming down that’s gonna be like this cool little twist where we think you did something, we find out Bishop did it’…And I was really intrigued for both of them because I wanted to know what Bishop—what was going to be the twist in our relationship.”
So it turns out that something was teased, which allowed La Salle to plan a little. However, he didn’t get all the details and had to wait for the script to find out exactly what was going on.
Take a look at the full interview with Lori Loughlin and Eriq La Salle for On Call, along with the three words and phrases they would use to describe their characters:
On Call drops in full on Thursday, Jan. 9 on Prime Video.
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