Eriq La Salle and Lori Loughlin both star in Prime Video’s upcoming On Call Season 1, with La Salle also serving as an EP and director. Ahead of the series premiere, Fangirlish participated in roundtable interviews with the actors and a few other outlets. We expect that viewers will spot, pretty instantly, how different Lieutenant Bishop is from the roles we normally expect Loughlin to play. And although La Salle has so much experience behind the scenes on Wolf Entertainment’s other procedurals, this show is so unique among them. So, we took the opportunity to ask the actors what about this project might have clashed with their past experiences — in short, what might have challenged them — and/or how their previous work might have helped them on this series.
For Lori Loughlin, the struggle was just about taking the character to a tough enough, confident enough, bada** enough, place. She told us she was “very tentative” when she began filming On Call Season 1. But Eriq La Salle “was really there to guide me as a director and help me shape the character. And I was timid, and I kind of would push the envelope — or so I thought — and he’d be like, ‘that’s it. That’s the direction. Now, we’re going to go a little bit more.’ And I’d do another take, and he’d come back and [say], ‘we’re going to go a little further.'” But eventually, “he gave me confidence to lean into, you know, the bada** part of me.” And that’s when “it really came together” for the actress.
Eriq La Salle discussed “going in with a fresh mind and open heart” because, for him, one goal is “to accomplish as much — as close to truth as you can get and as much of truth as you can get. And we find that in different ways.” As he put it, his “job as a director is to push the actors for truth, to help them to have the courage…one of my favorite moments is when you see an actor just embrace things courageously — to see an artist just, you know, unapologetically courageous.”
In fact, that idea of being “unapologetically courageous,” to La Salle, “was the tone of the whole show. We were trying something so different in how we shot it, and the style, and taking chances. There’s a good chance we were going to fall on our faces…But the beautiful side of that — the flip side of that danger — is the reward of, when you do accomplish it.” Case in point: In On Call Season 1 Loughlin “gets to play the kind of character that no one has seen her play — or people don’t think of her, and don’t cast her, in that way. And then, now all of a sudden, some of these people have to rethink those choices.”
So, even if On Call Season 1 doesn’t “fit” the usual formula, La Salle told us, “the Wolf [Entertainment] camp recognizes my potential to direct different types of shows, to tell different types of stories, to get different types of performances” out of actors like Loughlin and others. “So, each thing feeds itself. If I do a Law & Order episode, an FBI episode, when I used to run Chicago P.D. — all of that stuff just helps me to become more confident, more courageous. And then, it’s my job to pass that courageousness onto the people that I work with in front of the camera and behind. Because I want to infect them with this enthusiasm and this passion for the art and for truth.”
With this new series, La Salle told us, “maybe we’ll fall, maybe we’ll stumble. But I don’t really look at it as failure because we’re trying something different, and something true, and something cool.” Referring to the support during the press day, he told us “here, we were rewarded with the success of the results. And the fact that people are responding to it so well — that’s the reward.”
MORE: Check out our interview with On Call co-creators and EPs Elliot Wolf and Tim Walsh here.
Watch Eriq La Salle and Lori Loughlin discuss working on On Call Season 1 here.
All episodes of On Call Season 1 will stream exclusively on Prime Video beginning Thursday, January 9.
