The fifth-season finale of
NBC's Crossing Jordan — also the show's 100th
episode (airing Sunday at 10 pm/ET) — marks the dual
milestone with one whopper of an opening: The morning
after celebrating Lily's pending marriage, Jill
Hennessy's lady coroner wakes up with a gun in
her hand and next to the dead body of her former beau,
J.D. Pollack (Charles Mesure). With
little recollection of what did or did not transpire,
Jordan becomes the No. 1 suspect!
Perhaps the only person
taken aback more by the situation than Jordan was her
portrayer. "What's funny is there were a lot of rumors
going around about this episode for over a month before
I actually got a script," Hennessy tells TVGuide.com.
One example of the taunting she endured along the way: "Allan
Arkush, one of our executive producers, walked
past me on the set one day and said, 'Oh, boy, are
you in for it! You have no idea.' I said,
'Tell me, Allan! Tell me!'"
But Arkush kept mum.
Ultimately, "when I finally got my hot little hands on
that hot little script," Hennessy relates, "it was a
total page-turner. I'm always dying to see what they're
going to do, and from the get-go, the opening scene of
this episode, you saw it could go so many different
places. What happens to Jordan? What becomes of her
emotional state?
"They also left it
wide open," she continues, "for the possibility of
what I hope will be movement into more of the political
type of story lines."
As evidenced by...?
"Jordan actually ends
up in Washington at the end of the episode," the actress
reveals, "and the audience has no idea what she's up to.
But we are left with the feeling that she's going to try
to figure out who is after her and who actually murdered
Pollack."
Maybe Woody's lady
friend, Lu, got crazed with jealousy and sought to snuff
the competition, we suggest. "That'd be fascinating,"
Hennessy chuckles. Trying again, we propose that one of
the hotties from sister show Las Vegas secretly
crossed over again to frame the good Dr. Cavanaugh.
"That's also a possibility," she says, politely
pandering.
The allure of
"possibility" is precisely what has the Crossing
Jordan star excitedly looking forward to perhaps
100 more outings. "I'm open to anything," she professes.
"We could literally go anywhere at this point, and I
think the writers are ready to do that. I've already
heard some possibilities about plotlines of next season.
[NBC renewed Crossing Jordan last week.]
We really have no boundaries left."
Ruminating over 200, even
100, episodes at one time was almost unimaginable for
Hennessy, as she thinks back to her first days promoting
Jordan's premiere. "At one of the first
upfronts I went to, a couple of people said to me, 'So,
a female coroner show. How long do you think that's
going to last?'" she recalls. "And in that first
season we were the No. 1 new show, which a lot of people
forget. Our show hit hard, and thank goodness we had
that core audience because we've been up against a lot
of stiff competition."
Why did it strike a
nerve the way it did? Recounting her initial attraction
to the series, Hennessy says, "I hoped that people would
respond to [creator] Tim Kring's
characters, which to me were so appealing and unique and
original." So unique and original that others
couldn't help but copy. "Since Tim created the show five
years ago, there have been so many other shows that have
come on and been heralded for these great 'original'
ideas, and I'm thinking, 'Um, we did that five years
ago.'
"We had an original
concept combined with great forensic story lines, which
are more popular now," she says, adding to her praise
for the show. "And the characters are so well drawn and
funny — they don't take themselves too seriously. As an
actor, it's more fun to play that than be forced to
spout purely technical dialogue every episode."
Flashing forward to the
very recent past, Hennessy shares how the night after
she wrapped her work on the finale, she hit an audition,
then returned to the set to shower the cast and crew
with vino. "They were still working, god bless them, so
I was the only one semi-inebriated," she reports with a
throaty laugh. "And just so you know, I was not on the
clock as an official Universal [Television] employee at
the time, so I think I was safe!"
