CHICAGO FIRE: Jimmy Nicholas Reveals a Sweet Hawkami Milestone was Unscripted

Prior to the heartbreaking Hawkins (Jimmy Nicholas) twist in “Completely Shattered,” things were going well for him and finally-official girlfriend Violet (Hanako Greensmith).

In fact, after the duo had lunch with Brett (Kara Killmer), the couple exchanged casual “I love you”s as they said goodbye—the first (and last) time they had done so on-screen.

But the sweet moment almost didn’t happen. “That was not in the script,” Nicholas acknowledges to Give Me My Remote. “[Going into season 11] we knew we had three episodes left. Hanako and I, we’re Bonnie and Clyde; we’re always conniving and thinking of things. I think we both had a bucket list of the things that we were hoping for in those final episodes. And one of them, that Hanako had mentioned time and time again, was, ‘I hope we get an ‘I love you’ [from] both of us to each other.'”

When they got the “Completely Shattered” script, the duo was “a little sad” to discover it wasn’t included there—”there was no ‘I love you’ moment—there was no goodbyes, obviously, in the fire, which was something else to process as well,” Nicholas notes.

However, when the actors got to set, they were able to make a slight tweak of their own. “Matt Earl Beesley directed that last episode—Matt Earl is amazing,” Nicholas gushes. “He actually directed my first episode, ever, as well. So he’s my guy; he bookended my journey there. And he is great about really taking what the actor shows up with on the day and using that.”

Inspired, “I just looked at Hanako, and we have a tendency to add little things into our scenes at the end,” he continues. “We both were like, ‘What if we sneak some ‘I love you’s in at the end of this lunch date? We’ll see if we get away with it.’ And we didn’t get a note on it [after the first take], so we kept doing it. We’re like, ‘It’s still in, it’s still in, it’s still in!'”

The actors didn’t know they had really been successful until it came time to do post-production work on the episode. “We did ADR for it, we got to see the rough cut, and we both called each other and celebrated that our ‘I love you’s had stayed in,” Nicholas recalls with a laugh. “So it was a very triumphant moment of us getting to have that.”

Given the Hawkins’ tragic end would unfold in the same episode, “it was a little like leading cattle to the slaughter,” Nicholas admits. “We were hyper-aware that while we are just committing to what’s happening in this scene, what the writers and the showrunners put on the page for us to do, we also were aware that we were going to just kill people all over [by the end of the episode].”

Check back with Give Me My Remote after the Wednesday, October 12 hour, “The Center of the Universe,” for more from Nicholas.

CHICAGO FIRE, Wednesdays, 9/8c, NBC

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