Felicity Huffman's longtime friendship with Joe Mantegna helped her tackle “Criminal Minds” role: 'It makes it easy'

The costars recall the first time they met and talk David Rossi and Jill Gideon: "There's been a lot of water under the bridge between these two."

This article contains spoilers for Criminal Minds: Evolution season 2, episode 7, "Piranha."

David Rossi reunites with an old flame in the latest episode of Criminal Minds: Evolution.

Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster) contacts a psychiatrist once on the BAU payroll named Jill Gideon (Felicity Huffman), despite warnings from Joe Mantegna's Rossi (“I am forbidding you from contacting Jill”). A new franchise character with ties to an original one, Jill is the ex-wife of the late Jason Gideon (Mandy Patinkin) — and she also has a complicated past with Rossi. The latest episode, “Piranha,” concludes with an emotional Jill revisiting her ex’s office (which now belongs to Rossi) and a cliffhanger reunion between the two.

How do things pick up next week? 

Related: Criminal Minds vet Joe Mantegna responds to his DILF status: 'I'll take that as a compliment, I suppose'

“We’ll see,” Mantegna tells Entertainment Weekly during a joint chat with Huffman. “I think it mirrors what people might expect [between characters] put in that position. Obviously, there's been a lot of water under the bridge between these two. And now we'll find out: Is it calm water? Is it turbulent water? We don't know.”

“Well, she broke Rossi’s heart,” adds Huffman. “Do you think that’s true, Joey?”

“I think it's somewhat of a red herring in a way,” he says. “What does that mean, she broke Rossi's heart?  Is there something more to it than that? Even when I read it, I thought to myself, ‘Well, okay, let's see what that means.’ And that's what makes it interesting. I mean, it'd be too simple to just say, oh, it's just that. We still have miles to go before we sleep between these two characters.”

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Huffman felt very much like “the new kid” joining the long-running series, but it certainly helped that she and Mantegna, too, share a history — one considerably less strained than their TV counterparts. Mantegna is a good friend of William H. Macy, Huffman’s longtime husband. This also isn’t their first time sharing the screen. Alongside Macy, Mantegna and Huffman starred in David Mamet’s 1988 crime comedy Things Change and Steven Schachter’s 1992 drama The Water Engine. 

“I've looked up to him forever, and so it was 1. A level of comfort, which is lovely, particularly when you're a guest star because you're such the new kid with something that's been going on 17 years, and 2. A level of admiration,” Huffman says of creating that onscreen dynamic. “So you just try to not screw up. I think it helped because I trust him, I admire him, and it makes it easy to jump, which I think is what you need to do in these things.”

“We have a history of working together and knowing each other over the years, so it's the best of all worlds to be put into a relationship like this,” Mantegna adds. “It’s a meaty, exciting aspect to our show. I love when we get into these personal stories. We will solve the crime, don't worry about that, but it's stuff that's the underpinning, that's going on underneath. To be able to do it with someone who you have complete faith in and know very well, it just makes it all the better.”

Huffman still remembers some of the earlier days of meeting her costar, including one as a new mother. “I had my first kid and I was kind of a basket case,” she recalls. “Bill wanted to go to Joey's famous Christmas party and I was like, I can't go anywhere with this new baby. We walked in and it was a big party and Joey came over, and because I was a new mom — my husband took off by the way — Joey was like, ‘Come over, sit down. What do you need for the baby?’ He got me food. I was in love. I was like, this is a gentleman.”

For now, it's unclear if their characters share the same admiration for one another. Showrunner Erica Messer previously described Rossi and Jill’s dynamic to EW as “old friends who almost know too much about one another to be enamored with one another anymore.” Yet, “Maybe there is still something there that was never allowed to be because he was married, she was married,” she noted. “It's a complicated relationship.”

This week’s episode reveals that Jill worked with Gideon and Rossi during the early days of the BAU, when the FBI was ramping up its study of serial killers. In the 1990s, Gideon and Rossi drafted an unpublished assignment outlining a hypothetical scenario that would generate serial killers — and it has since fallen into the wrong hands. Gold Star, it turns out, is a twisted offshoot of North Star. What is North Star? The BAU, meaning Gideon and Rossi’s paper is the blueprint for Gold Star. What comes next remains to be seen.

Related: Criminal Minds boss on season premiere cliffhanger and what comes next: 'You have to decide if it's true'

Paramount+ recently renewed Evolution for a third season (and 18th overall for the franchise that began on CBS). Mantegna insists he has zero intel on what comes next. “It’s in the hands of the writers and Erica Messer," he says. "I have every faith in them keeping the quality as it has been.” Huffman, though, would be game to return. “It's the nicest cast. It's such a lovely environment,” she says. “It's a very small boat. You want to fill it with people you love, and they certainly did."

New episodes of Criminal Minds: Evolution drop Thursdays on Paramount+.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.