Shantel VanSanten on Nina and Scola Not Getting Married, Fight With Father

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for FBI: Most Wanted Season 6 Episode 3 “White Buffalo.”]

Nina’s (Shantel VanSanten) family visit does not go well in the latest FBI: Most Wanted. Her father Jackson (John Finn) and sister Tina (Hannah Adrian) come to town, meet her partner Scola (FBI‘s John Boyd) and their son, and it all ends with a heartbreaking dinner.

First, Jackson has issues with sushi. Then he makes a remark about Scola thinking he’s too good to join them (he doesn’t) and Nina argues he barely knows him. He wonders when they’re getting married, and Nina reveals they’re not, they’re happy with how things are. And then he comments on how she’s raising Dougie, not seeing anything wrong with how she grew up. But “everything was wrong with the way I grew up,” she tells him. “I couldn’t get away from home fast enough.” He thinks he gave her a good life. “Keep telling yourself that. Keep telling yourself it was a great life, dad,” Nina says. “I want a different life for my son and I am damned determined to give it to him.”

Jackson decides to leave—his parting words to Nina that she’s going to ruin her son with the way she lives—and calls for Tink to go with him. Nina’s sister tries to make excuses for Jackson and says it will blow over, but Nina admits, “I’m okay if it doesn’t,” before Tink leaves her alone.

Below, VanSanten talks about that final scene, Nina and Scola’s decision about marriage, and more.

My heart broke for Nina in that last scene. It felt like as soon as Nina said that everything was wrong with the way she grew up, that she’d wanted to get that off her chest for a while.

Shantel VanSanten: Yeah, I talked with David Hudgins a lot about what was in Nina’s past. I’ve always had a bit of her story written before I ever had one second of screen time. Even when I first started on FBI, I had a history for Nina, the foundation of who she is and why she operates the way she does. And our childhoods are a huge part of that, all of the unresolved issues that we act out as adults in real life. And I think Nina’s obviously wrestling with accepting who her father is and the fact he’s never going to change and things that happened in her childhood, the absence of her mother, her mother died when she was very young.

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And I think now Nina being a parent, it’s interesting, I find that she’s not as forgiving with her father, that there isn’t as much empathy, that there is some unresolved issues and anger that are there for the way that she grew up and the things that happened. And while they don’t get specifically touched on, I think a lot of us can understand that feeling, and we will dive into it further in this season and we’ll get to find out more about Nina and kind of peel away the onion of different layers that have been there for Nina and why she is the way she is.

Does Nina think that her and her dad’s relationship can ever change, especially given how they leave it in this episode? Because I mean what he says about the way that she’s raising her son, that’s going to be tough to get past.

I don’t know if she’s really hopeful. I think she’s a little, I guess, resolved with just knowing that he’s not going to change and that he can’t be a big part of her life if he’s going to be this way, that he has to do some changing and accepting and opening to what her life is, the choices she’s making as an adult, the way that she had to pick up the pieces when their lives as children fell apart. She was the surrogate mom to her sister. There’s just so much there that it’s almost like we’ve peeled away a layer and underneath is just so much to wade through that I don’t know if right now she’s in a place of hope. She’s in a place of, I have my partner and I have my son and my sister and I have a relationship, and her dad wasn’t really a great parent to begin with, so she’s a little like, why do I even need him?

Yeah, because there’s such a clear difference between the family she was born into and with her relationship with her dad and the one she’s built with Scola, even with her team, there’s acceptance. There’s just easy acceptance there with everyone else.

Yeah, there is. And of course, isn’t it always that way with your chosen family in life where you get to lay out everything that you went through and bond over things everybody goes through in their childhood and similar feelings or situations and then find a common ground of understanding. And with her and her father, they’re so far apart on what her childhood was like, and he is very avoidant of taking accountability that until that happens, I don’t see me being Nina a way forward, a clear path into healing.

But then there’s her relationship with her sister because her sister does go after her father when he calls her. So how is Nina feeling about that? Then we get that moment at the end of Nina alone at the table.

It’s so complicated. She understands that. I think she wishes her sister would have moved away and been in the world more and had a bit more of an eye-opening life, but there’s also some guilt there because Nina did leave and I think she sees her sister and thinks that’s what would’ve happened to me had I not left. And I just became my father’s caretaker and enabled him to do the things he’s doing, to drink and to pacify the pain and to just keep the peace, and that’s just not who and what Nina is. And because Nina was the one who really was the surrogate parent and mom for Tink when her mother died, when she left and had to leave her with her dad when she went to college. I think that there’s another bigger conversation that just has never happened, that there’s this sisterly bond of being there for one another, but that Nina carries around a heavy load of feeling like it’s her fault that Tink didn’t get to have a bigger life or have the space to become her own individual away from her dad.

We also get that line about Nina and Scola not planning to get married, which I like—

Me too!

—because they’re happy. That’s what matters.

I think that that’s always been the case with them. Nothing has ever been conventional in their life. She’s not the one who dreams of some big white wedding dress and wedding. It works. It’s solid and it wasn’t even something she was looking for. And so when it happens, she just doesn’t live in a fantasy fairytale life and they have such a beautiful partnership and commitment to one another that getting married just isn’t on the agenda. It’s maybe unconventional in some ways, but I love that that’s their story because there’s plenty of people that a wedding and saying that you’re married doesn’t mean you are more or less committed than people who wake up every day and choose to love one another and to face the world with the same commitment you would if you had signed a piece of paper and were wearing a ring.

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Yeah, exactly. What’s important is that they’re on the same page about it. If one of them wanted to get married and the other one doesn’t, then it becomes an issue.

That’ll be for Scola to discover because I think Nina knows pretty clearly the things that she feels and needs and wants, and that’s something that I really love about her, is the clarity of who she is and when it works, why—That’s just not something I think she ever dreamed of. When you grow up not seeing something, I just don’t think it’s a dream. Like your mom passes away when you’re so young and your parents before that really didn’t get along, that’s the idea of marriage. And so to be able to do it differently and in her own way is of course how Nina paves her path.

Which member of the team is Nina going to be opening up to going forward?

It’s funny, I’ve been wondering a lot about this as well. I think that they established early on that when I called Barnes Sheryll [Roxy Sternberg] that we kind of already had this relationship, but Nina is somebody who takes a little bit of time to open up, like work is a workspace and it’s where she puts on her armor and her walls are maybe a little bit higher, but so far we’ve seen her open up to Barnes last season in the car drive, both being mothers. So yeah, I mean I think it just depends, right? It depends on the situation, the case and who all of a sudden has their walls down enough to connect.

Are Nina’s sister and father coming back?

Yes. We will be seeing more of their familial relationship throughout the season and we’ll be seeing more of Scola and Nina.

FBI: Most Wanted, Tuesdays, 10/9c, CBS