Reid Scott Says 'Law & Order' Has Become a 'Brand New Show' in Season 24

Three episodes into Season 24 of Law & Order and it feels like a whole new show, with cases that hit the detectives and attorneys harder than ever before. That’s intentional, confirms star Reid Scott. He joined the show last season as Detective Vince Riley, and now he’s helping to usher in a sort of “rebrand” for the show. “I love that I got to be here for it,” he told Parade. “Right guy, right time is the way I look at it.”

🤩 📺 SIGN UP for Parade’s Daily newsletter & get the scoop on the latest TV news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🤩🎥

This week, it was Vince’s turn to find his personal life colliding with his professional life as his brother Matt, played by Ryan Eggold, showed up in security footage talking to a guy who later ended up dead. Vince then found himself struggling with whether to trust his brother enough to let him become an informant in exchange for lessening some gun charges against him. Matt helped lead the team to the right killer but bailed on the stand when it came to testifying because he knows being a snitch is unforgivable.

That left the team with nothing but Vince’s confidence and some circumstantial evidence, while Vince’s reputation rested on a guilty verdict. Luckily he got it, but then had to go arrest his own brother for selling guns to an undercover cop. It can’t be easy for a detective to have a criminal for a brother, but it’s just the kind of conundrum that Law & Order is ready to explore as cases get more personal.

Related: Everything to Know About Law & Order Season 26

“It might start with Riley, but we get to see this through all our characters,” he says. “That’s the plan for the season to really dig deeper and draw the audience in further and allow them to care about not just these cases, but the people who are investigating these cases, the people who are trying these cases. Once you have that real strong connection to these characters, then the experience just gets deeper and deeper. It’s a brand-new show, in a sense. They’re sort of rebranding the show and taking it to a whole new level for a modern audience. I just think it’s something really special.”

Read on to hear more about this new era of L&O and how Scott and Eggold’s real-life friendship impacted their characters.

Related: Everything to Know About Maura Tierney’s Law & Order Character

How has this “rebrand” for the show play out over the season? Are we getting more big arcs, or still very case by case?
I think it’s more case by case, as we’re feeling it out right now. There has been some talk of, “How do we call back some of these things?” I think everyone just loved what we got to do with Ryan Eggold in this particular episode. I don’t have the answer right now, but I have the inclination that we’re going to see a little bit more of that at some point. I think that’s going to be true amongst all the characters. It’s sort of like we’re feeling out these backstories, and when we’re finding that they’re successful and know that they’re working, all right, great, now we know that we can go deeper in later episodes. So I think if the cases themselves aren’t necessarily linked throughout the season, you are going to see a real theme emerge of going deeper and deeper and deeper with these characters and see how cases from the beginning of the season might still haunt them later on.

Tell me what was on Vince’s mind when he saw his brother on the security footage.
I think at first it’s an “Oh shit!” moment. They have a long history of butting heads. Certainly there’s a lot of love there, and they’re definitely brothers who subscribe to the idea that blood is definitely thicker than water. But they’re on opposite sides of the law. And I think Ryan’s character has been a thorn in the side of my character his entire life, and when he sees that his brother’s involved in this, A. I don’t think he’s all that surprised, and B. he’s like, “Man, this is one giant headache that I do not need right now.” And the way it unfolds over the course of the episode, I think you really get to see what Riley is made of, the sacrifices he’s willing to make, not only for truth, justice, and the shield that he carries, but also for his family. In the end, you have to be cruel in order to be kind. It’s a tough moment for him.

It’s kind of wild that Vince can trust Matt at all when he’s already disappointed him so much. How does this brotherly relationship work?
It feels almost paternal, in a way. In my personal life, I’m a dad. I’ve got two boys, and my boys are great. But boys get into trouble. I think I was able to sort of apply a little bit of that into the relationship between mine and Ryan’s character. Your heart wants nothing more than to trust the people you love, even if your head tells you that’s the wrong move. We could probably say this is the thousandth time that Riley has had to trust his brother to do the right thing, and it turns out to be the thousandth time that he’s let down. But that familial love and that bond is hard to let go. You’re gonna keep trying, no matter what happens. You see Riley, in the end, have to make this incredibly difficult decision that could haunt him for a while. We’ve already talked about the possibility of digging even further into this relationship in further episodes. We had a blast playing with this.

Riley is already working hard to gain the trust of Brady, so how does this story affect him going forward? What does Brady think of him now?
I think that [he] got a lot of mileage with Brady, to show that he’s the kind of guy that, even though he and Brady might butt heads and have different ways of doing things and they’re still trying to work out the mutual respect thing, I think she sees that in the end, and indubitably, he’s a good cop. He does the right thing. He’s trying to do right by everyone on all sides. But in the end, I’m not going to cheat. That’s not the kind of guy Riley is. He is a man of honor. And [as for] what it does for the show, I love that it just starts to peel back the layers of our characters. It finds a whole new gear for the show.

How was it building up this brotherly relationship with Ryan?
It was made a lot easier by the fact that Ryan and I are actually friends. We’ve known each other for a really long time. When I moved to LA from New York, I kind of fell in with a USC alumni crowd that were poker buddies, and Ryan was part of that crowd, and we got to be friends. Then we shot a movie together maybe 12 years ago in Michigan where we were all kind of stuck in a cabin together for about a month, and we got to be really, really tight. We just loved the way we worked opposite one another and we had a lot of fun off camera.

We’d always wanted to do something together again, so this opportunity was great. He came in with some really incredible choices, and I think it really was our personal friendship and our personal history. We just sort of dropped right in. We have such a great shorthand. We know how to push each other’s buttons and how to play with each other in the right way. It’s a dance, and he’s just such a great scene partner, and he’s so easy to work with. If it wasn’t for the fact that we had to lock him up at the end of the episode, it was like, “How do we get him back for the next one?”

We just had so much fun. We ended at 3:00 in the morning on a rainy Friday night in Brooklyn, where it’s Ryan, Mehcad and myself pushing each other in the chest and waving our guns around and yelling at each other, kind of cops and robbers kind of stuff. It made you feel like a little kid, and we just had so much fun with it. Everyone had a big smile on their face, like, “Man, this is what this place is all about. I can’t wait to do more of this.” 

Next, What Happened to Camryn Manheim’s Character on Law & Order?