It’s been about three and a half years since Prodigal Son was canceled, and we still think it deserved at least another season to wrap up that wild cliffhanger. No, seriously, we can talk about this show for hours. And so when Dermot Mulroney, who had a killer arc at the end of the first season as Nicholas Endicott, stopped by TV Insider’s New York office to chat about his newest role playing the new chief on Chicago Fire, we had to ask him about his bloody ending on the short-lived Fox drama.
That was “a very well-written character,” Mulroney recalled. “That show really caught people. It’s such a shame it didn’t continue because people were crazy about it. They still are, they’re rewatching it, of course. But they had set up so much for him.” Due to the pandemic and filming the end of Season 1 out of order, a couple of episodes weren’t able to be filmed which would have explored Nicholas and Jessica’s (Bellamy Young) relationship “as being something where it’s almost like a romantic comedy,” executive producer Chris Fedak told us at the time.
That was news to Mulroney, who recalled filming right up to the shutdown. “My understanding is that I had the same ending. They just compressed it because they had to hustle up and combine episodes and eliminate one or two just to get to that end zone,” he shared before raving about that ending: Ainsley (Halston Sage) killing him after all season Martin (Michael Sheen) had been focused on Malcolm (Tom Payne) possibly following in his murderous footsteps. That all led to that “my girl” moment.
“Changes it up at the end because she completely eviscerates me,” Mulroney said of the “gruesome” scene for which a lot had to be taken into consideration. “They were worried about blood on the carpet of the set because we have to shoot there later. The clock was ticking, we were masked, and there were screens and gloves and everything on that set. It was a scramble to do it. So it was mayhem.”
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Mulroney also played the cello for Prodigal Son, and he praised the show’s composer Tim Perrine. While he wasn’t present in Season 2, he recalls that Endicott was mentioned “endlessly,” as he put it. “I kept hearing from friends, ‘Why aren’t you on the show?’”
Something he particularly enjoyed about being part of Prodigal Son was working with Lou Diamond Phillips (who played Gil); they previously starred together in Young Guns. “To watch him work… He’s a brilliant actor and has all sorts of other qualities on the set, would take too long to explain, but that was amazing to see him again.”
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