Julian McMahon On The Season Finale Of 'FBI: Most Wanted': 'Very Simple And Beautiful'

FBI: Most Wanted will wrap up their first season tonight at 10:00PM ET/PT on CBS and streaming on CBS All Access. Originally slated to go beyond this week, production was altered due to the Coronavirus pandemic and will end a few weeks early instead.

CBS Local's Matt Weiss spoke with series star Julian McMahon about how his quarantine has been going, the cast's last day on set together and what to expect in tonight's season finale.

MW: Hi Julian, awesome talk to you today, how are you doing? 

JM: Good, how are you? 

MW: Doing well, How are you holding up in quarantine? 

JM: I think I'm kind of like a lot of people, I go through my phases and some of it seems to be pretty positive and exciting and whatever else. Then I have my other moments where I'm like, 'OK I'm ready to go back to the planet that I was used to before and all that kind of stuff. It's an interesting journey. Sometimes it's moment to moment, sometimes it's day to day. I think we're all having these kinds of journeys of things that we haven't discovered before. Time spent the last seven weeks with my family has been great. I'm doing good, they're really good. I mean under the circumstances and I certainly wouldn't be complaining based on some other people have gone through.  

MW: Have there been any new activities, any new hobbies that have come up during this? 

JM: It's been an interesting time because my daughter still at college. They're still having college. So, every Monday to Friday she has classes like three times a week. They're in the middle of finals. I wasn't prepared to be doing finals at college. 

This is a time in her life that parents are not supposed to be in but it's actually been kind of cool. She does an art history class, which I've become a little bit obsessed with. She just wrote her final paper, which is really awesome. 

The hobbies and stuff, I'm hoping that depending on how much longer we're doing this for we'll do that kind of stuff. We've been doing a few things. We watched all the Harry Potter movies. Then the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies. We wanted some fun stuff, to enjoy our evenings. That was really cool. 

MW: Have you be able to keep in touch with your castmates at all? We're on video chat right now. Have you done any with your castmates? 

JM: We haven't done any video chats, but we text each other all the time. I check in with everybody all the time just to make sure they're OK. I've been watching the episodes, I like to tune in with them. We work really hard on the show and it's pretty much just the five of us so we got pretty close. We spent a lot of time together in confined spaces, in interesting places. We always check in with each other and everybody touches base. 

MW: When did you all find out production was going to be halted?

JM: I got the call on the Thursday night, they said we think we're going to shut it down. I was like alright, well let's wait until this scene is over because this is going to be real tough one for everybody. That's how we left it. We finished shooting a scene and everybody was moving stuff to go to the next one. But they got everyone together and told us we were done and we're done literally right now. It was really kind of an odd moment.

It was so finite and definitive at that moment of time, like nobody's coming back tomorrow, you can't come back and get your stuff. I remember I was cleaning out my trailer, and was like can I just do this… 'No, No the trailer is going right now and that's it.' It was really kind of strange moment. I was trying to mostly console people who were upset by it. There were quite a few people upset by it, particularly crew members. It's been an odd experience for everybody.

MW: And now we have the season finale on Tuesday, what can you tell us about this episode? 

JM: It's an interesting one because for the first time we see a few different things, particularly from my character Jess that we haven't really seen before. It's about a father-son team who escaped from prison in the middle of a transportation to another prison. They're both criminals and both bank robbers and they go into this spree of robbing banks to try and finance their ability to get out of the country. The Clock is ticking, as we kind of follow their trail to get there before they actually get the amount of money. they go about it by robbing small banks with little bits every night. Then they go for a large heist and that's where we catch 'em.

It's a great episode. My character Jess had a tough relationship with his own father. He draws on that knowledge, and that understanding, and that relationship to be able to communicate with this father-son criminal team. Another interesting part of it for Jess is this is the first time we get to see him humanized and struggling with raising his daughter after he lost his wife a couple of years ago in Afghanistan. This is first time we get to see it. 

Then we also see his brother in law one of the five team members, he encourages him to contemplate meeting other people. To be a bit more social. He's the least social guy you'd meet, he just wouldn't do that kind of stuff. He tries to encourage him to come out of his shell a little bit, I guess is a nice way to describe it. 

We have a couple of scenes where he meets a couple of people. He meets a girl at a bar, he meets somebody else. It's in the confines of how we do the show. We're not going to have a party. It's a very simple and beautiful moment. Jess gets the courage to talk to somebody outside of the FBI, it's quite sweet. 

MW: Well I'm a big fan of the show and I'm really looking forward to seeing that. Thank you for the time today Julian and stay safe, good luck to your daughter on finals!

JM: Yeah you too mate and you take care and good luck with everything!

The season one finale of FBI: Most Wanted airs Tuesday, May 5th at 10:00 PM ET/PT, only on CBS and streaming on CBS All Access. Check your local listings for more information.