FBI: MOST WANTED Post-Mortem: Roxy Sternberg Breaks Down the Barnes and Charlotte Twist

March 12, 2024 by Marisa Roffman

FBI MOST WANTED Barnes Charlotte relationahip

“Hollow” – The Fugitive Task Force heads upstate to assist in a search for missing and murdered Indigenous women and hunt down the serial killer responsible. Meanwhile, Barnes struggles to find time to bond with her wife, on FBI: MOST WANTED, Tuesday, March 12 (10:00-11:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network, and streaming on Paramount+ (live and on demand for Paramount+ with SHOWTIME subscribers, or on demand for Paramount+ Essential subscribers the day after the episode airs). Pictured (L-R): Fedna Jacquet as Charlotte and Roxy Sternberg as Special Agent Sheryll Barnes. Photo: Mark Schafer/CBS ©2024 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Tuesday, March 12 episode of FBI: MOST WANTED.]

“I met someone.”

With three little words, FBI: MOST WANTED’s Barnes (Roxy Sternberg) had her world rocked on the Tuesday, March 12 episode when her wife, Charlotte (Fedna Jacquet), confessed there was someone else.

Things had been quasi-tense between the duo, with Charlotte working on a trial in DC and Barnes hard at work—and also frequently out of town—with the Fugitive Task Force. But the agent was blindsided that things had spiraled that much in her marriage.

Sternberg was equally shocked when she got the script for “Hollow.” “I was given no forewarning; I just got the script,” she tells Give Me My Remote. “We get the script about a week before we shoot them, and we don’t get any heads up. I think a couple of times the producer has said, ‘Oh, this next one’s heavy on Barnes’ family stuff.’ And so then I say, ‘Oh, can I get it beforehand? Because I’ve got lots of lines to learn and I want to, like, dig into it.’ But I was given no forewarning of this; I read this like it was a regular script.”

“I was thinking, ‘You know that beginning bit was a little bit stressful,’” she continues. “But when I got to the end, I cried. I cried and I texted Fedna, who plays my wife, a screenshot of that last line. And she sent me all these crying emojis.”

Sternberg then reached out to FBI: MOST WANTED showrunner David Hudgins—”I was really upset. I was like, ‘What the hell are they doing? Why would they do this to us? We’re a solid relationship! Why would you try to do this? Why would you ruin this?’ I felt very protective.”—but the two couldn’t immediately touch base.

“That was so stressful,” she recalls. “And it was just like, ‘I need to sort this out’—which is actually I think how Barnes would deal with it in that moment, as well; wanting to kind of brush it over and make it all fine. There is an elephant in the room, there’s a big thing that needs to be addressed. We can’t just move forward, how the hell did this happen? So I felt very sad and like I wanted to save it. And I still feel like I want to save it, and I think that is a response from me and that also was the same response from my character.”

“That’s also a great thing about receiving these scripts only a few days before you play them: you don’t have too much time,” she continues. “Of course, if something’s really terrible, you want to have enough time to change it. But you don’t have too much time to indulge in it. I felt like it was still pretty raw. I felt like I was still hearing it for the first time when I was performing it.”

FBI: MOST WANTED Roxy Sternberg interview

Professionally, while all of this is going down, Barnes will have to soldier on…albeit “I’m a little bit distracted, which I think one would be in real life,” Sternberg says.

Personally, Barnes is not ready to give up on her family. “They’re definitely going to try to fight for it,” Sternberg says. “And there’s a scene that comes up…with them fighting for it…I don’t know what the writers’ end goal is and I don’t want to know; I think it would affect my performance.”

“It’s weird because with a film, you get a script and you know the entire arc of the project—you know exactly how it’s going to end, how it’s going to play out, everything,” she continues. “And yet with this, because it’s kind of never-ending, it just keeps coming to you. I feel like I don’t want to know what their end goal is with us because I don’t want to lose hope. And I want to be able to play it in a raw way. I kind of like getting it and just playing it as it comes. And I think that’s quite a great thing about our scripts. I think that’s what’s really fun with these amazing scripts that we get. They’re very alive.”

One lingering question mark for Sternberg is how the couple’s kids will react if—or when—they find out about their parents’ potential split.

“I have no idea,” she admits. “We’ve focused on the [romantic] relationship right now. I think that’s the first thing that needs to be [dealt with]. But of course the kids have to be brought in. My parents divorced when I was quite young. And the most important thing is that you protect the children, and so that should be our focus. Of course, let’s try and hold on and protect this marriage, but we need to look after those children. And so I’m sure at some point there will be scenes with my children.”

“These [are] really tender years [for the kids],” she continues. “And that will be bloody difficult. Oh, that would be awful. I don’t know what they have in mind. But that would be really difficult, having to talk to children about this stuff. I can’t even fathom it. My parents did it with me, but I was a little bit older and I was kind of excited by it all; I was like, we’re gonna have two houses?! …I was kind of seeing my advantage. But I think I was in denial. It’s a very sad thing. I hope that we approach it in a sensitive way.”

Pictured (L-R): Dylan McDermott as Supervisory Special Agent Remy Scott, Roxy Sternberg as Special Agent Sheryll Barnes, Edwin Hodge as Special Agent Ray Cannon, Keisha Castle-Hughes as Special Agent Hana Gibson, Eddie Spears as SRA Whitehawk, and Shantel VanSanten as Special Agent Nina Chase. Photo: Mark Schafer/CBS ©2024 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The marital turmoil wasn’t the only troubling thing in the hour for Barnes: While they were tracking down a suspect, they found a cooler full of human organs…that the man, who was sick with cancer, was trying to consume in an attempt to heal himself.

“I almost thought it was comical,” Sternberg says of filming that reveal. “It was so awful. You know sometimes you can’t digest it, it’s so awful? I remember when I was a kid, I had a school teacher who told me that she had learned that her sister had been run over—and in that moment she laughed. Sometimes you don’t know how to deal with things, your emotions are just all over the place with such shock and you’re heightened. And with these organs being revealed, it was almost like you’re trying to take it seriously, but it’s crazy. It’s crazy.”

“Some things are just unfathomable to try and get your mind wrapped around,” she continues. “I feel like also a lot of acting is based on reality, things that we’ve seen already, and there’s substitutes. I followed this acting coach, Ivana Chubbuck, and she talks about even though I’m supposed to be breaking up with my husband in the script, think about if you don’t have a husband in real life, who is it that you’re really kind of breaking up with in your life…So I was trying to find a substitute for these organs and I couldn’t find anything—like there’s nothing. I just couldn’t. I’m afraid the acting juices were just like, ‘Nope, nothing compares with this.’ It’s just terrible! Some things you’re just completely blocked from, you just don’t even want to go there. You can’t.”

FBI: MOST WANTED, Tuesdays, 10/9c, CBS

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