‘Suits LA’ Star Josh McDermitt on Stuart’s Intentions With Erica and If ‘Seeds of Reconciliation’ Will Grow for Him and Ted (Exclusive)

Suits LA is already bringing the tension just several episodes in, and Josh McDermitt weighed in on Stuart’s tough situation with PopCulture.com.

McDermitt’s Stuart Lane is a defense attorney, and despite being friends and partners with Stephen Amell’s Ted Black, Stuart left for his own firm in the premiere episode following a merger and caused quite the rift.

In the latest episode, “Dester,” Stuart tried to extend an offer to Lex Scott Davis’ Erica, telling her that if and when Ted loses the murder trial, she’s going to get offers from other firms and he wanted to be the first. However, Erica remained adamant about staying with Ted, but will Stuart continue to try to poach her as he did some of Ted’s other employees and clients?

“I think there’s a recognition with Stuart that Erica is a fantastic attorney,” McDermitt said. “And it’s always fluid with Stuart, the situations. And I think there was an element at that moment of trying to stick it to Ted, for sure, by trying to poach her. But also, I believe that he believed what he said to Samantha was like, ‘Listen. You know, if they lose this case, their ship’s going down, and she’s gonna get offers, so it might as well be us,’ because he recognizes her talent.”

“He wanted her to come over initially and then ended up going with Rick,” he continued. “So, I don’t think that’s the end of the interactions between Stuart and Erica, but it’ll be interesting to see if he’s continuing to get her to come over there or if these seeds of reconciliation that we see between Stuart and Ted start to really take root and what grows from that. Because I think to Stuart, that’s more important, is to repair that friendship that is broken almost beyond repair at this point. And I think really trying to poach Erica again would be crazy. But, you know, Stuart’s a wild man.”

That being said, there certainly continues to be some tension between Stuart and Ted. However, there was one moment in the episode where Stuart tried to play a practical joke on a coworker, and they didn’t find it funny, but Stuart quietly mumbled, “Ted would.” McDermitt admitted that there is some part of Stuart that wishes things had gone differently with the merger and that they were still friends.

“I think Stuart 100% could have handled the merger differently,” McDermitt said. “But at the same time, Stuart felt like he was standing up for himself, setting boundaries with the guy that there’s a lot of toxic behavior between. This isn’t all just one-sided from Ted. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had friends in my life as Josh that I’ve had to kind of say ‘Enough is enough’ and set a boundary with them. And it’s hard, and it’s hard to stick to it, especially when you have a long history with this person because I don’t think it’s ever malicious. It just ends up being that’s just what happens until you find yourself in that position where you’re like, ‘This has to stop.’”

“I think that’s where Stuart was on a grander scale, obviously,” he explained. “And so when he says something like, ‘Well, Ted would have,’ that’s him just kinda reminiscing about their friendship and maybe even thinking, like, ‘I wish I handled this differently.’ They’re both still lawyers. They’re both still doing the thing that they love. It’s just not necessarily with the person that they love the most, with each other.”

The episode saw them actually working together to help a Hollywood producer named Lester, who was initially Stuart’s client before the merger and who was being tried for murder. It was a rare occurrence, but McDermitt thinks it was an “entry point for sure to get them to come back together. We might see that.”

“Ted’s still an entertainment lawyer, and Stuart’s still criminal defense,” he said. “So, unless there’s more crossover with producers killing people… It’s about Los Angeles. There may not be opportunity in that sense, but I think the door is open for them to team up and work together again. But like I said, I think these are seeds of reconciliation, not necessarily the reconciliation. And they just have some more growing to do, each of them, on their own before they join forces and tackle the next case together, especially being at different firms now. Their firms aren’t together. So that might be a hard sell for either one of them to say, ‘Hey. Come work on this case with me.’”

Considering this tense dynamic has been going on since the first episode when Stuart betrayed Ted, one would think it would be hard to get into that mindset right off the bat. However, McDermitt welcomes it and was “really happy that I got to take a punch to the face from [Stephen Amell]. He and I both have a lot of stunt experience on our resumes, and I think this was a show that… I don’t wanna speak for him, but we both probably came into it thinking like, ‘Oh, wait. There’s not gonna be any stunts on here.’ So then, when we got to actually do something, it was fun.”

“And it was really exciting too, because Bryan Greenberg said that he hasn’t had to do a lot of stunts on the shows that he’s done,” McDermitt continued. “And so we were kinda rehearsing that punch. And Bryan, Rick Dodson comes in and grabs Stuart to keep him from bum-rushing Ted. And we just kinda walked through the beats and went through the motions. And then when they called action, Stephen and I went full tilt and just went at each other, and Byan can’t hold me back. I’m a large man. And afterwards, Bryan was like, ‘What the hell was that? Oh my god. That was crazy. I did it.’ Bryan was going nuts, and Stephen and I were like, ‘Man. That’s what you do.’”

“It was fun,” he said. “It’s really great to work with Stephen and to play in the flashback scenes and the present-day scenes, and it just really kind of runs the gamut of the relationship between these two guys.”

There will be a lot more to look forward to with these dynamics as Suits LA’s first season continues. It’s hard to tell how Stuart and Ted’s relationship will go, but since they are mostly unfriendly with each other, it may not go so well, but you never know what could happen. New episodes air on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on NBC.