Law & Order: OC’s Ainsley Seiger Offers the Lowdown on Jet and Reyes’ Grief-Fueled Tryst — Plus: Does Sgt. Bell Know?
Grief makes people do funny things… like carry on a secret affair amid an office of skilled detectives and think no one will notice.
Detectives Bobby Reyes and Jet Slootmaekers are so torn up by Det. Jamie Whelan’s death, Law & Order: Organized Crime‘s Season 4 premiere revealed, that they began sleeping together at some point in the months that followed the loss. (Read a full recap.)
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Let’s be clear: Jet is handling her sadness “not well!,” Ainsley Seiger, who plays the tech whiz, tells TVLine in the video above, shot at a recent celebration of Law & Order: SVU‘s 25th season. Fans of the series will recall that Slootmaekers and Whelan grew closer over the course of Season 3. When Whelan was paralyzed during a shootout in the season finale, a worried Jet told him she loved him. But he was so certain that he didn’t want to live without the use of his limbs that he begged Reyes to turn off the machines keeping him alive. Reyes wouldn’t do it, but Jamie’s visiting father eventually did.
The months that followed apparently were rough for Jet and Reyes. Seiger says that the revelation that the co-workers are now engaged in a complicated (read: he’s married) relationship required some immediate processing with Rick Gonzalez, who plays Reyes.
“When I read the script for the first time, I had to FaceTime him for about two, three hours, just because I was like, ‘I don’t… I don’t know how I feel about this. I really don’t know,'” she recalls. “I needed to hear from him. He’s an actor that I trust so much and who I admire so much, and we chatted about it for a while. And then got coffee about it.”
Reyes, Jet and Whelan were such a strong trio of friends/co-workers that, without Jamie, “the relationship now exists in a very different context,” she explains, adding that grief “can drive you to do some really crazy, really weird, maybe morally-not-so-good stuff. I hope that that’s the energy that we brought to it, because now we both feel very strongly about this relationship.”
Know who else might feel strongly about the relationship? Sgt. Bell, aka Slootmaekers and Reyes’ boss.
Hear Us Out: Law & Order: SVU and Organized Crime Should Be One Show
“Oh, she’s going to pick up on it, for sure. Absolutely,” Danielle Moné Truitt, who plays Bell, told TVLine in a separate interview. “Number 1, she’s a great detective. Number 2, she’s grown. Number 3, she’s a Black woman. We always know. We always know.”
But Bell, ever the diplomat, may hold off on airing her feelings about the hookup. “She’s not blind. It’s just a matter of when she’s going to say something about it, you know? She chooses her words wisely. She knows when to speak, when not to, and she waits,” Truitt adds. “She waits for a specific time to broach the subject.”
Press PLAY on the video above to hear more of Seeger’s thoughts about that premiere revelation — as well as how the artificial intelligence pilot program will help Bell’s team this season — then hit the comments with your thoughts. Jet and Reyes: Yay or nay?
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