‘FBI’: Missy Peregrym Talks Maggie’s ‘Huge Conflict’ & Guilt as Guardian to Friend’s Daughter

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for FBI Season 6 Episode 7 “Behind the Veil.”]

On FBI, Maggie (Missy Peregrym) is now pulled in two directions: her job and being the guardian of Ella, her late friend Jessica’s (Charlotte Sullivan) daughter.

Ella’s grieving, confused, and numb, Maggie tells her partner OA (Zeeko Zaki) upon arriving at a crime scene in the latest episode. Maggie is, too. She’s just trying to be there for her, and that means, when she can, answering when she FaceTimes her. (She does have to ignore a call during the investigation.) Ella explains she just wanted to see her, and Maggie assures her she’ll be home soon. She has so much anxiety about her coming home at the end of the day, Maggie explains to OA.

“It’s one of those things where I’m just trying to do the right thing by Ella and also continue to do my job. What other choice is there? To me, there’s no other choice. I’ve got to be there for her. She lost her mom and I was the guardian. And Maggie will always step up to do the best that she can,” Peregrym tells TV Insider. “But it’s a huge conflict and I think that there’s guilt there that I can’t just be there for her all the time, that I am sort of unavailable when she’s going through this really hard time.”

At one point during the episode, Maggie decides she’ll be the one to go under a stage to look for a bomb, even as OA tries to get her to let him do it, even bringing up Ella.

“I’m in a situation where I could save so many lives. Do you know what I mean? It’s so serious and it’s so difficult,” says Peregrym. “This is the hard part about being an agent. You’ve got to sacrifice. You put your life on the line all the time for the lives of others. And so there’s this difficulty where now I’m taking care of Ella and can I even be doing this stuff anymore? And that’s just not something that you can turn off. That’s something that I’ve never even had to experience before. And so to have to do this in real time…”

There’s also the practical side of it, the star points out. “The truth is he would never be able to fit under the stage. That’s why I did that. It was a very logical decision, really in the end,” she explains. “I had a hesitation of like, ‘I probably shouldn’t be putting myself in the situation, but there’s a bomb that needs to be turned off and we need to find this, and I’m the one that fits. I’m the one that’s here, and it’s instinctual for me to do it.'”

FBI, Tuesdays, 8/7c, CBS