Jenna Dewan's Future on 'The Rookie' Just Got Much Clearer
Jenna Dewan won't be leaving The Rookie anytime soon, at least if her recent promotion is any clue to her future on the show. After joining the ABC cop drama in the Season 3 finale, the actress, who stars as firefighter Bailey Nune, has been promoted to series regular for the current fourth season of the fan-favorite show, Deadline confirmed Monday.
Dewan joins current series regulars Nathan Fillion as John Nolan, Alyssa Diaz as Angela Lopez, Richard T. Jones as Wade Grey, Melissa O'Neil as Lucy Chen, Eric Winter as Tim Bradford, Mekia Cox as Nyla Harper and Shawn Ashmore as Wesley Evers. She joined the cast in the Season 3 finale, "Threshold," which aired in May, with her character becoming involved in a light romance with Nolan. Following the episode, showrunner Alexi Hawley teased to TVLine that Dewan's character was there to stay. He told the outlet, "we couldn't really do a ton of love interest stuff during the middle of the pandemic, but at the end of the day it felt like, 'Let's find him somebody to potentially take us into next season'. And Jen is really special, and I love the character."
Dewan's promotion to series regular comes after the beloved series lost a core member of the cast in the Season 4 premiere back in late September. Actor Titus Makin Jr. left the series after his onscreen counterpart, Jackson West, the son of Internal Affairs CO Percy West, was shot in the back by one of Sandra "La Fiera" De La Cruz's hitmen. Makin had been a main cast member on The Rookie since the ABC show premiered in 2018. Speaking of his exit to TVLine, Hawley said, "what I can say is that Titus [Makin] was not coming back to the show, so we needed to do the best that we could to honor the character who's been so primally a part of the show."
"It's heartbreaking," Hawley added of Makin's exit. "But I didn't really have a choice. He wasn't coming back, and because of the way we set things up with the [Season 3] finale, there was just no way to tell that story without Jackson.... But we lean really hard into honoring how he was the heart of the show, and it was definitely impactful for us to have to deal with that."
Makin was just the latest cast member to leave the series, with his exit following that of Captain Zoe Andersen actress Mercedes Masohn's exit in Season 1, and the exit of Afton Williamson, who starred of Talia Bishop, between the first and second seasons. New episodes of The Rookie air Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.