Just a few days after the series was picked up for a full season, the cast and crew of Blindspot (sans series star Jaimie Alexander) gathered to talk about what the season will hold. Though it currently holds the title of highest rated new show of the season, creator Martin Gero, explained he and the writers, “designed the first season to be a 22 episode first season.” They also designed the episode titles to have a deeper meaning. “We’ve encoded a kind of hidden message in the first 10 episodes of the show,” he explained. Though he noted they’ll have to find a new code after that since a fan figured it out after the second episode.
The assembled actors also teased what’s coming up for their characters. While Sullivan Stapleton–who plays the show’s co-lead Agent Kurt Walker–insisted he likes to avoid knowing what’s coming for his character so it doesn’t affect his performance, he did tease that if Jane Doe does turn out to be Taylor Shaw, “the guilt that he’s carried for 20 or so years will start to wash away.” Gero also said that “the Taylor Shaw of it all” would be a driving factor in the arc of the first season and Jane will struggle with that new knowledge. Gero also said that even when Jane finds out she might be Taylor, the characters won’t start calling her by the new name. “It doesn’t affect any of the hybrid ship names yet,” he joked.
Rob Brown, whose character Edgar Reade is still wary of Jane said that, “going forward, there has to be a point where Jane kind of proves herself and maybe Reade isn’t so skeptic.” Actress Audrey Esparza said audiences will learn about her character’s vices and Ashley Johnson said we’ll be getting a peak into her character Patterson’s personal life, including meeting her boyfriend played by Joe Dinicol, who Johnson called, “the most adorable boyfriend on TV.”
Johnson’s screen loves and non-Blindspot work were a surprisingly prominent topic during the panel with one audience member even asking about her scenes with Chris Evans’s Steve Rogers in The Avengers. “That’s never gonna happen,” she said of a romance between the two, though she admitted, “I too wish Captain America would just choose a simple waitress.” Audience members also praised her voice work in video games like The Last of Us and Tales from the Borderlands and she said that while acting and voice work are somewhat different, she still “approach[es] them both in the same way.” Sullivan also received praise for his work on the Cinemax series Strike Back and joked that the biggest difference between filming for a major network versus cable is that he, “can’t say the word ‘ass’.” Actress Mariane Jean Baptiste was asked what it was like for a non-American actor getting work in the U.S. and after she said it wasn’t difficult for her, Gero joked, “if you’re Mariane Jean Baptiste it’s not hard to get a job acting.”
