We're hitting the streets of Los Angeles again with our blue and red lights, blaring sirens, and "Daddy Cop" on the radio as Season 8 of The Rookie is given delightful updates at this year's San Diego Comic-Con.
The cop procedural is one of the most talked-about on TV at the moment, giving us iconic lines and an even more iconic will-they-won't-they romance in the form of Chenford. We started with a group of rookie cops stumbling their way around a police station and their TO's shops, but now, the show has taken flight, quite literally, as Season 8 kicks off in Prague after the rollercoaster of the Season 7 finale, where new villains are forced to work with our favorite L.A. cops.
Cast member Nathan Fillion, who plays John Nolan, and writer Alexi Hawley sat down with Collider's Steve Weintraub at SDCC 2025 to talk about the new season. Before delving into The Rookie, they recall their favorite theaters, and Fillion reveals a quirky yet sweet habit he has on set. Following the announcement that Season 8's first episode is in Prague, Hawley reveals how the show managed the logistics and budget through thrifty "pod-car" episodes, including the unusual rigs and skills these special cars demand from the cast. They also tease Season 8, including a coveted update on Chenford's future, while Fillion also teases his "F-Bomb" filled involvement in Netflix's upcoming show, Lanterns, following his role in Superman. You can hear all about this straight from Fillion and Hawley in the video above, or you can read the transcript below.
'The Rookie's Nathan Fillion Gifts Guest Stars Gadgets on Set
"A welcome gift."
Nathan Fillion and Alexi Hawley at SDCC 2025 for The Rookie Season 8
COLLIDER: I have so many questions for you about The Rookie, but I like throwing a few curves at the beginning. I'm obsessed with getting more people to see movies in movie theaters. For both of you, do you have a favorite movie theater?
NATHAN FILLION: I do.
ALEXI HAWLEY: I know what you're going to say. Go ahead.
FILLION: Mine is the IPIC. There's one in Westwood, there's one in Pasadena. It's reclining chairs, some good food. I go when I'm hungry and don't eat beforehand. That's the way to see a movie.
HAWLEY: I like The [Chinese] because the two times I've been there have been for premieres, both for Superman and then for Exorcist: The Beginning, which was the prequel that I was the last writer standing on. So, it felt like it was the premiere movie theater.
Here at Comic-Con, a lot of people collect things. Do you collect anything, or if you're on the Comic-Con floor, what would you be looking for?
HAWLEY: I have a fairly large comic book collection. That being said, I haven't actually collected comics in a while, at this point. I kind of fell off on it. Honestly, my old eyes have a hard time reading comics now. There's something about panel layouts and stuff that's a little harder for me to input it.
FILLION: You just do the iPad apps for comics because they make the panels much bigger. I collect flashlights and fidgets.
Nathan Fillion and Alexi Hawley at SDCC 2025 for The Rookie Season 8
Are you being sincere?
FILLION: Not the spinners. More like clickety clack things with haptic kind of magnetic… Yeah. They quiet my mind.
HAWLEY: Nathan's a very big gadget guy.
FILLION: I love gadgets. I collect gadgets, as well.
HAWLEY: He’s also very generous. Any time anybody comes to set, guest stars, stuff like that, they'll find something in their trailer.
FILLION: A welcome gift. Some nice headphones, a battery for their phones, a Bluetooth speaker, or something like that.
Hawley Talks Navigating a Police Show in Today's Political Climate
"Policing was a complicated, and still remains a complicated thing."
Nathan Fillion as John Nolan and Lisseth Chavez as Celina Juarez in The Rookie
Nathan, I have an individual question for you. Most actors, if they win the actor lottery, they get to be on one show that lasts multiple seasons. You have won the actor's lottery a lot. You had Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place. You had Castle. Now you have The Rookie. I don't know what the question is, but how the F have you done it? Because it is impossible to do what you've managed to do.
FILLION: I can't tell you, "If you do this, then you'll get TV shows, and they'll run for a long time," but I will tell you that the three steps to what I consider being successful are: be lucky, be grateful, and pretend to be bold.
Have you sent a thank-you card to Robot Chicken for helping you get Green Lantern?
FILLION: Actually, Robot Chicken got me in there because I was Green Lantern before for Andrew Romano. She used to pilfer the Joss Whedon projects for casting different DC shows, WB stuff, all the animated stuff. So I was Hal Jordan in that first, and then Robot Chicken had me continue that role, and I think kept me in the minds of those who think about Green Lantern.
If you watch Robot Chicken now, it's very funny.
On The Rookie, every season, and especially the first few seasons, you learn how to make a show, like what you can do in the budget, what you can do on the schedule. How has the show refined its process, or is it like you have a process for each season, each week, and you have a machine that's really synced up?
HAWLEY: It's a bit of a complicated answer, partly just because of the obstacles that we've all gone through over the last eight years, with the pandemic and the strike, and with the murder of George Floyd and having to deal with how to be a police show in a time where policing was a complicated, and still remains a complicated thing. I think Season 1 was a traditional Season 1, where we did some stuff right, we did some stuff wrong, and we did some stuff as a clusterfuck. Ultimately, that's where you start to learn how to make the show, what's expensive that you didn't think would be expensive, and how to do a smaller episode.
At this point, having gone through all of those things, we definitely know the kind of episodes we can do that are small budget-wise, but don't feel small when you watch them. This season allowed us to go to Prague and go $1 million over budget on that first episode, knowing that we had ways to be commensurately under budget during the course of the season to get us back to even.
FILLION: It is a dance. Alexi has the legs of a dancer.
'The Rookie' Uses "Pod-Cars" to Make Small-Budget Episodes
"It allows the show to really just exist driving around the world."
I always make a joke about Star Trek and how in some episodes the ship would lose power and everyone had flashlights, and it was a flashlight episode, because in three episodes, there was going to be a huge Klingon battle. You've got to save your money and pick your battles. Your Season 7 finale had helicopters, and it was a really big episode. Had you purposely been saving to deploy additional resources for the finale?
HAWLEY: Yes, exactly. We usually go big at the beginning and big at the end, and then during the course of the season, we have certain episodes that we know… They used to be called bottles, right? A bottle episode, that's the one where everybody's trapped in a room, and that's the whole episode. We actually do a version of bottles where we're out running around the city. One of them is, we call it the “pod-car” episode
The true-crime documentary episodes that we started doing during the pandemic are other ones, because there's so much talking head stuff that they end up being smaller episodes, but they don't feel small. I think it's a little unique to our show, given that we do so many different things, that we can do that, and you feel like you're not missing out on anything.
Alexi Hawley at SDCC 2025 for The Rookie Season 8
Nathan, what do you think would surprise fans to learn about the making of this series, or being on set?
FILLION: I think they'd be surprised to see what the pod-car — we keep mentioning this pod-car — what that rig actually looks like. When we're in the pod-car, there are about five cameras and lights set up across the front and coming into the windows on the side. We can't see anything out the front. There's a fella in a rig up at the top who was actually doing all the driving. We are in a caravan: about six motorcycle cops, two vans full of crew and directors. We're all connected, and we drive around the city trying to make sure we match the light for the direction we're going in. We have to hit those lines. It's hard to go back. Those are interesting.
HAWLEY: But that's literally why the show is the show, the pod-car, because we're literally driving around Los Angeles. We're filming out the windows, we're filming them in the environment. We're doing it basically in real time because we shoot both directions at the same time, which means if you have Nathan in one scene, and let's say Celina in the other, then we're shooting them both at the same time, so you don't have to go back and match coverage. If he had a great moment at a stoplight, we don't have to find a stoplight. It's being filmed in real time. It allows the show to really just exist driving around the world rather than process trailers and all that.
FILLION: But it's a real team effort. We are all in it, and it is a choreographed effort. It's a lot of fun, but it takes experience. But we have a crew. These guys are fantastic. These guys are fantastic, and the cast knows their job.
Hawley and Fillion Tease 'The Rookie' Season 8 Updates – Including Chenford!
"Part of her immunity deal is helping us catch a few bad guys."
There's a few people at Collider who watch and love the show, and they gave me a few questions. How do you think Chenford fans will react to the progress of their relationship this season, and will the two characters achieve stability like the other couples on the show?
FILLION: When you have a romance on the show, when are people ever happy?
HAWLEY: They're happy when they're together. I think that's pretty simple. That's a pretty simple thing. I think the short answer is yes. How's that?
Great. I'll leave it at that. Can you tease any of the new rookies coming in Season 8, and if there are some new rookies coming in, how does Nolan interact with them as the DL?
HAWLEY: I don't know that I can tease anything like that coming into Season 8. Ultimately, down the line… Yeah, I can't really tease that yet. There are some spoilers in there. I don't want to get into it.
What do you want to say about Monica showing up at the end of Season 7 and what that all means for everyone?
HAWLEY: I'm very excited about that. Part of the joy of figuring out some of our villains is how to keep them fresh and stuff like that. So, Monica showing up with an immunity deal was a great button to the end of the season. I think that, ultimately, it's going to generate some great stories for us going forward, like our trip to Prague, because ultimately, part of her immunity deal is helping us catch a few bad guys. So now she becomes part of the team. It's a weird thing.
FILLION: The one you love to hate.
Monica Stevens speaks to Wesley Evers in The Rookie.
How early on did you know the Season 7 finale? How much are you being told throughout the season, and how much do you sort of want to know script by script?
FILLION: Part of working with Alexi is the fact that you're very good at your job. I am a terrible television writer. I'm a pretty good actor. But as far as that goes to writing and plotting things, I leave that to the professionals, and Alexi has that handled. If I were worried about it, I think I would be more interested about, “Okay, what's going to happen next? Do I need to say something?” Hands off. Hands off the wheel, man. It's like the pod-car. I'm not actually driving.
HAWLEY: I do take great joy in coming to set sometimes and talking to the actors, and obviously you about some stuff that's coming up just to give them a heads-up for the storylines for their characters and stuff like that, so he's not completely out of the loop. But I also appreciate that you're like, “Oh, you're handling that. I got my thing that I gotta handle, and we're good.”
One of the other things about Season 7 is when you guys were all at the end, and you’re seeing Monica, you're teasing about the national security secrets being stolen. What can you say about that, and how much does that tie in to going to Prague?
HAWLEY: Ultimately, it sort of is putting the bow on the story about the bus hijack in Episode 11. Because that’s where she first showed up again, and there was something about an ID card being stolen. That bus is the real reason for that hijacking. So we sort of left that hanging in that episode. Then that ultimately is how she got the information to blackmail and leverage national security. I was happy that we could tie that off. Ultimately, this deal that she's made has an active part of it, which is you now have to help the FBI, and ultimately an LAPD-FBI task force, in bringing in some bad guys.
Fillion "Loves To See John Nolan Fail" in 'The Rookie'
"He's not a perfect man. He's not a perfect character."
Pardon me for not knowing. Where are you in the filming process of the new season?
FILLION: We're just about to start Episode 3?
HAWLEY: We started yesterday. I think it was our first day.
What do you want to tease? What are you allowed to say about the season?
HAWLEY: The joy of our show is really we do so many different things, so we can do a big event episode like Prague, where we go international and all this stuff, and we can do episodes that are more intense and sort of scary. I think Episode 3, without giving it away, is one of those that ends up being a very actually different episode for us, something very intense, something very interrogation room-driven, with high stakes but not real action. Then, we have stories in between. We do romantic comedy episodes. We do have a Valentine's Day episode again this season, which is always fun. It's just a joy that we have all these different kinds of ways that we can do The Rookie, so let's just keep doing them all the time.
Do you have a favorite storyline or favorite episode, something that really stands out for you?
FILLION: I love to see John Nolan fail. I love to see him being handed his shit because that's where true character comes into play. You build character by failing.
HAWLEY: Some of my favorites, obviously, the Harold Perrineau, Season 2 into 3, that Detective Armstrong, that relationship, that friendship that became a betrayal, and how you got set up. That was all really, really dynamic.
Nathan Fillion and Alexi Hawley at SDCC 2025 for The Rookie Season 8
FILLION: John Nolan's mother when she was around. He's not a perfect man. He's not a perfect character. His relationship with his mother was awful, and he's okay with that.
HAWLEY: It was interesting because in that storyline when she died, and you had to go back, there was a sense, which I think is a natural sense, to want to round the edge off that, to have some sort of moment of like, “Oh, she might have been awful, but she was my mom." And I just really felt like she was awful. We didn't have to let her off the hook. We didn't have to give you a cathartic moment. We just had to sort of put you in that world and see the pain that you went through having to clean up after that mess. That was a good one.
Fillion Teases Upcoming Netflix Show 'Lanterns' and Playing a Villain
"It's very freeing to play that kind of stuff."
Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner / Green Lantern in Superman
I'm just about all the time, but I have to ask you. I am so, so looking forward to Lanterns. What can you tease?
HAWLEY: There's cursing.
FILLION: There's cursing. When I went and did The Recruit for Alexi, my character got to curse a lot, and I thought it was very freeing. It's very nice. I thought, “Oh, my god, I dropped a couple of F-bombs and said some bad words in here. It looks like you can do that on Netflix.” And then I went to Lanterns, again, thanks to Alexi, because he gave me the time and the ability to go out and do other projects, and I dropped more F-bombs than I have, I think, in my entire career put together in one scene of Lanterns. He really lets loose.
What's really cool about Lanterns, and James [Hawes] has talked about it and Damon [Lindelof], is that it's going to be like a different tone, a different show than what people saw in Superman, but it's still the same character. It's like a mystery on Earth, and there are three Green Lanterns. How do the three of you get along? What is that like, if you can tease?
FILLION: I think everybody hates Guy Gardner pretty consistently. He's unlikable, and he doesn't mind. He's okay with that. I think he's a very defensive guy. He's a guy with a chip on his shoulder. He doesn't want anybody close to him, but he also doesn't care what anybody thinks. That's a hard guy to get close to. That guy's brain-damaged, you know?
HAWLEY: But it must be fun to play because you usually play the hero.
FILLION: Usually, I'm the hero kind of guy. It's very freeing to play that kind of stuff. It's just nice to get out — and thank you again — to be able to do these other, more unlikable roles.
One of the things that James [Gunn] talked about, and Peter [Safran], is how everyone who signs on for DC, you're signing on for an eight or 10-year sort of thing. Obviously, I don't know how long you might survive or the dynamics of everything, but what is it like for you to sign on? You could be playing this in video games, animation, or live action. What's it like for you?
FILLION: It makes me think about, "Would it be okay for John Nolan to have a bowl cut?" Because then I wouldn't have to wear a wig for any of the Green Lantern stuff.
HAWLEY: I don’t remember being asked whether you could commit the next eight to 10 years of your life to somebody else other than me.
FILLION: Oh, I just kind of assumed. We'll have to talk about this later.
The Rookie Season 8 will premiere in 2026.
