Blindspot is an American crime drama TV series which focuses on the discovery of a tattooed woman, found naked by the FBI, stuffed in a travel bag in Times Square, New York. She has no recollection of her past, and she doesn’t know anything about who she is, but the FBI discover her tattoos themselves are vital clues to crimes that they will need to solve. So far the series has received generally positive reviews, and it has a 68% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. As someone noted Blindspot is elevated by its chief and long-term mystery and the audience are always permanently in a state of disbelief.
But recently stars Sullivan Stapleton, Audrey Esparza, and Ashley Johnson were special guests for the FBI’s Explorer Program in their New York office. The FBI explorers are a piece of the bureaus life and career program named Exploring, which spans the entire United States and covers many fields, allowing people aged between 14 all the way up to 20 who are looking to starting a career in different avenues, but its primary goal is to help and inspire people to develop their interests and make them interested in their futures. The Explorers program runs on a yearly program, and the FBI show young people the program where their agents are trained, and at the same time they’re taught teamwork and helps them to create bonds with the people they work with.
This years batch received a treat with a screening of March 8th’s episode of Blindspot, and then the FBI agent in charge, Greg Tolomeo, introduced and moderated a conversation with the three stars who had come to speak to the hopeful prospective future FBI agents, and after they’ve played agents for the FBI themselves on television, Stapleton, Esparza and Johnson, shared the comparisons between the real-life FBI and the fictional world they played FBI agents.
One of the things all three actors compared their acting lives with the FBI, and indeed every other law enforcement agency in the world was the closeness and the family dynamic, though the two worlds of acting and law enforcement are both very different. Stapleton’s early work had trained him and he used that experience to help him teach his co-stars how teamwork actually worked. In gratitude, his co-stars helped him memorize his lines, which had been difficult to do thanks to a nasty head injury he’d suffered in 2014.
In the show, the cast is more than aware of how different their portrayal of the FBI is compared to the one in the real world, but they do their best as they try to be as accurate as they can be, though their version of the FBI is a lot more stylized. When they are out in the field acting, they try to be as realistic as they can be, but they play it in such a heightened manner, and they’ve observed if the real agents acted as emotionally as they had, their work wouldn’t get done.
The cast of Blindspot enjoy the change to portray the FBI to their millions of viewers, considering it both an honor and a privilege to showcase the organisation who fight every day for America and to keep their people safe, and on the show the cast get to see how little lauded the FBI are when they solve a case which could have great repercussions, and in the stories the cast act out in they always have something new to do, and if the cast could just remind everyone the FBI’s work is special, it would feel great.
The trio of actors also spoke about their career paths, and Johnson personally commended the Explorers program and laments the lack of such a program like it as she was growing up, and she might actually have done something different as she grew up.
None of the cast knows for sure if the people in attendance had been inspired or not to become agents of the FBI, but in any case, Esparza had great advice for them all. She told them their futures were theirs, what they wanted to do was completely up to them, but she also told them to focus on what they wanted to do with their lives. It’s a great thing to know, especially in this world of social media which promotes comparison between peers.
Granted, the FBI Explorers program is geared to inspiring people into becoming part of the law enforcement community, but it hammers Esparza’s words right in, and everyone can actually apply any skills they’ve picked up in their lives to anything.
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