‘The Rookie’: Mekia Cox Breaks Down Nyla’s Killer Cat-and-Mouse Game: ‘She’s Almost Flirty With Him’

Note: The following story contains sppilers from “The Rookie” Season 7, Episode 5.

It sure didn’t take time for Detective Harper to find her footing after her traumatic serial killer scare in the fourth episode of “The Rookie” Season 7, which left the seasoned detective temporarily paralyzed and truly rattled for the first time in a long time.

But the fifth episode of Season 7, titled “Til Death,” found Nyla back on her game in a big way, doggedly pursuing the serial killer, and embracing some of her undercover training to charm and disarm her suspect.

“I think what’s kind of fun is that she comes in and she’s almost flirty with him,” Cox told TheWrap of the cat-and-mouse dynamic between Nyla and her suspect. “Fringe” and “Big Sky” actor Seth Gabel steps in as the vending machine supplier, Glasser, who catches Nyla’s eye as the prime suspect during her investigation. “The Rookie” star Mekia Cox praised Gabel as “an actor’s actor.”

“I love a good line reading, just continuing to read lines over and over and over again before we shoot, and he is an actor’s actor, so he loved that as well. So we just played,” Cox said. “I think it’s kind of fun that it starts off as this sort of nice, flirty almost, relationship, and it takes a quick turn.”

Indeed, over the course of the episode, their relationship goes from semi-flirty to openly antagonistic by episode’s end, with Detective Harper tapping into her years of undercover assignments to navigate the shifting dynamic. So what motivates Nyla to throw herself so fully back into the danger right after she escaped it?

(And we do mean, right after as the show makes a humorous point to note she took a single day off to recover).

“It’s become part of who she is,” Cox said. “I think she’s been in she’s had this job for many, many years, and she was doing undercover work where this is what she did in 24/7.”

Not only is Nyla’s undercover background fully baked into her character, Cox says it’s something she still misses. “I think there’s a part of her that loves sort of the adrenaline rush that she gets from these sort of things that she really hasn’t had in a while, and, and I think a switch flips where she just is in go-mode, and she becomes hyper-focused on the thing that she intends to get and and won’t let anything derail her from that.”

“She knows that she has to be safe right now, because she has two daughters now, and she has to be safe for them — that’s why she came back and decided to be a to in the first place. She has to be safe,” Cox continued. “But there is a part of her that misses that rush, I think that that misses the danger a little bit, because when you when that’s that’s part of your life, 24/7, and then it’s taken away, it feels like a loss.”

But being safe is relative when you’re a detective in Mid-Wilshire and by the end of “Til Death,” Nyla drops the act entirely, letting Glasser know that she’s onto him, she’s coming for him and not only is she watching him, the whole LAPD is. So why the change of tactic?

“Obviously we know how these cases are, unless you have an abundance of evidence, there’s nothing you can really do. So you have to wait until the time is right, and you have to wait until you have collected enough evidence to be able to bring that to people. And she’s not there yet,” Cox explained. “But she also knows that this person can go back out into the world and do some of the same things he’s been doing, and she doesn’t want that to happen. So she’s trying to let him know I got my eye on you. Not only do I have my eye on you, but all the LAPD has their eye on you, and we are watching. So don’t do anything. Don’t mess up.”

New episodes of “The Rookie” air Tuesdays on ABC and streams the next day on Hulu.

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