The Rookie - Interview: Patrick Keleher On Seth's Backstory and Lies

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The following contains spoilers for The Rookie, “The Return”.

THE ROOKIE – “The Return” – TUESDAY, APRIL 29 (9:00-10:01 p.m. EDT) on ABC. (Disney/Mike Taing)
NATHAN FILLION, PATRICK KELEHER

The Rookie’s latest episode, “The Return,” saw the comeback of Seth Ridley, who washed out six episodes ago for his habit of lying.

Lying about previous tragedies, almost getting his coworkers killed, and pretending to have cancer should warrant the character being washed out for good but somehow, Seth won the lawsuit against the city and is reinstated in the FTO program at Mid-Wilshire.

But why does he come back? What does Seth gain from it?

“I think he has to,” Patrick Keleher tells SpoilerTV. “He has to. There’s a reason he became a cop. And the writers have their own ideas to what’s going on, but when I [was] in the process of creating this character, it had to do a lot with how damaging he is to himself by lying, how much he actually hurts himself and how he thinks he needs to replace that–by helping people, by being a cop. And he says it in the very first episode, where they’re sitting there after the crazy shootout, and he’s like, ‘You know, I just wanna help people.’ That’s all he wants to do.”

By the end of the episode, Seth makes the right choices–he saves Nolan’s life at the risk of his own and loses his limb, then he comes clean to Tamara about all his lies. For once, he tells the truth.

“I kind of created my own backstory, my own idea, early in the season when we were shooting,” explains Keleher when asked about Seth’s origins. “Alexi came up to me (the creator of the show) and he said: We think that Seth has grown up in a very low class household and he wants to fit in with the upper class and he goes to school with the upper class, or he’s neighbors [with the upper class] or something. And from a very young age, the way to get up there was lying and that was just his natural instincts. It got him what he needed for a very long time, until it didn’t.”

THE ROOKIE – “The Return” – TUESDAY, APRIL 29 (9:00-10:01 p.m. EDT) on ABC. (Disney/Mike Taing)
PATRICK KELEHER, DERIC AUGUSTINE

You can watch The Rookie’s latest episode on Hulu. Catch the next episode, “Mutiny And The Bounty,” live on ABC on May 6th at 9/8c!