CHICAGO P.D. Post-Mortem: LaRoyce Hawkins on Atwater’s Healing with His Father and the ‘Great’ Season Finale

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Wednesday, May 3 episode of CHICAGO P.D., “The Bleed Valve.”]

After a lot of angst—and working together to try and protect a young neighborhood boy on the run—CHICAGO P.D.’s Atwater (LaRoyce Hawkins) and his father, Lew (Erik LaRay Harvey), finally found a bit of middle ground on the Wednesday, May 3 episode, “The Bleed Valve”…and Atwater asked his father to help him with some help on the building he owned.

“Healing is important, you know?” Hawkins tells Give Me My Remote in the video below. “If we understand his history, it’s been 20 years where Atwater has felt like he’s been alone in trying to navigate manhood without his father. While trying to prioritize father figures, while also trying to be an example of Black excellence, at the same time. So there’s a lot.”

“What was important for us was to create a relatable healing story,” he continues. “Not something that felt contrived or forced; it’s going to feel a little uncomfortable, which we think is correct. But how we grow through the uncomfortability in real life is what we want to do our best to reimagine on screen. And so it’s a conversation between Erik LaRay Harvey, who plays Atwater’s dad, where we were just vulnerable with each other, just talking about the relationships with our fathers, personally…he felt a lot about his dad like Atwater feels about Lew…and so we were able to identify those relationships in our lives.”

With the CHICAGO P.D. season quickly coming to a close, this is the last real look at the father-son dynamic we’ll see this season, Hawkins confirms.

“I think it sets us up for a very interesting arc next season,” he says. “As we conclude on this episode, we’ve got about four of them left. And it’s really time to dive into what creates a great finale—which I think we do have a great finale. And I’m excited for this episode because I think it sets us up, if you enjoy Atwater, this would be a great time to lean into him. We won’t see him at this capacity anymore until next season, but you will see Atwater showing up and doing his best to take down a very, very, very dark, bad guy.”

CHICAGO P.D., Wednesdays, 10/9c, NBC

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