At the beginning of season five of Sons of Anarchy, Theo Rossi got to be part of a scene that reminded him of his early days on the show. His character, Juice, was visiting an escort service and decided to have a little fun of his own with the madam of the brothel.
“Juice was kind of being funny, I remember I went to [creator] Kurt [Sutter] and said, ‘Nice! Juice is back to being the funny guy,’” Rossi, 37, tells The Hollywood Reporter.
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But Sutter had five little words for Rossi: “Don’t get used to it.”
[Warning: Spoilers from the Tuesday, Nov. 13, episode of Sons of Anarchy.]
The dark storyline that haunted Juice for most of season four has finally returned this season, and, of course, it surfaced right when Juice seemed to think that the world was finally getting back to the way it should be.
At the end of last Tuesday’s episode, Juice had just watched his fearless former leader, Clay (Ron Perlman), finally recover his physical strength and then reunite with his estranged wife, Gemma (Katey Sagal).
“Before he got on that bike, before you see Jax following him, he thinks for a second, ‘Maybe everything’s gonna be OK. Maybe everything is going to get back to normal,’” Rossi says of those final moments.
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But, of course, everything is not OK. Everything is actually about to crumble down around the mohawked member of the motorcycle club. As the audience knew, Jax (Charlie Hunnam) had just found out that the member of the club who had become a source for the authorities was Juice.
On Tuesday’s episode, Jax confronts Juice about the secret he’s been keeping for so long now. Juice comes clean to Jax, telling him that he became a source for the Feds because they knew that his father was black, which would have been an instant ousting from the California motorcycle club.
“I think Juice knows that the dominoes are coming down. What do you do here? You go into survival mode,” Rossi tells THR.
“I don’t think he was prepared for this,” he adds. “This isn’t about hanging yourself anymore. This is the realization that you are most likely going to get massacred. You are most likely in a lot of trouble.”
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But Jax doesn’t take the news to the table, instead telling Juice that the only way to save himself is to spy on Clay for him. That’s a complicated option for Juice, who Rossi says has a very close relationship with the fallen leader of the club.
“He put Clay up on a really high pedestal recently,” Rossi explains. “Clay had filled that void of the father figure. If you noticed, he calls him ‘son’ all the time.”
“This is an absolute no-win situation for this guy, and I think that that’s played out pretty magnificently by Kurt,” he adds.
While Rossi can’t say too much about where Juice goes from here (or if he even survives the season), he did talk about the unexpected growth of his character from the comedic relief into a man dealing with secrets that push him into situations that can have very tragic consequences.
“I’m just so lucky to have a character on a television show that I couldn’t be more proud of, who gets to explore all of these emotions,” says Rossi. “This show has changed my life in more ways than I could ever say.”
Sons of Anarchy airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on FX.
Email: Rebecca.Ford@thr.com; Twitter: @Beccamford
