On Season Two’s nineteenth episode of Nikita, titled “Wrath,” Nikita is captured and tortured by a man she once targeted back when she worked for Division. The episode, which originally aired on April 20th, featured an amazing performance by Maggie Q that was both beautiful and difficult to watch.
We spoke to the actress in early July during the San Diego Comic Con and asked her about what it was like to film the episode. “It was horrible, it was horrible,” she recalls. “There were times [filming those scenes] where it was awful. It was really, really hard.”
Writer and Producer Albert Kim penned the script for “Wrath” and Q tells us that with his scripts, you never have to look for the heart. “Albert is an incredible writer. The thing I really love about Albert, especially about him being a man, he always has the heart of the story. It’s always there. I never have to look for the heart in Albert’s scripts. And mind you, I do go through scripts and go ‘I don’t know how I’m supposed to be emotionally affected by this. We need to go through this again.'”
Q also revealed that Kim went to a dark place when writing the script and when the time came for her to bring his words to life, she knew she had to reach out to Kim, her friend, for help. “He was actually in a bad place writing it because it was just so difficult for him to go there. And when I got [the script], I called him up and I said, ‘I really need you as my friend on this episode. I need you to support me through this because I don’t know if I can do this without a real friendship.’ And he said, ‘Maggie, I’m there for you. I love you and we’re going to do this together.'”
A moment in the episode Q loves is when Michael finds the restrained Nikita and pours his heart out and she’s very upset. “It was a very, very dark side of Nikita. What I love about these writers is that they’re not afraid. You don’t see that in hero characters. That episode basically exposed the reality that Nikita really, really wasn’t a good person. She wasn’t always a good person and there’s a reason why she fights so hard against the demons because they’re there and they’re real because she participated in this willingly. And it was kind of something Percy always talked about about [evil] being in her and it really was.”
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Nikita Season 3 premieres on Friday, October 19th, at 9|8c on The CW.