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Gregory Smith plays the wise cracking Dov Epstein in Universal Channel’s new cop show Rookie Blue. We caught up with the man himself recently and spoke to him about his character and his personal high point of the series so far.

What were your favourite scenes to film from the first season of Rookie Blue?

One of my favourite scenes to film was in episode 7, I delivered a baby. The episode is basically a heat wave and we’re out on the street handing out water bottles to pedestrians and civilians. And somebody comes up and says ‘help, help there’s somebody screaming in this house and I think they’re in trouble’. We go in and it’s this woman who’s agoraphobic, which means she’s afraid to go outside, and she’s going into labour but because of the heat wave there’s a power outage and all the ambulances are jammed up, so it’s just me and this other cop I’m with. We’re on our own and we’ve got a couple of books that she had in her house and we had a little bit of training at the academy. It’s life or death but it’s also a situation you can have so much fun with. The actress who played the pregnant woman was incredible.
 

When do you think Dov has that moment where he realises he’s arrived as a cop?

That sort of arcs out over the whole season because early he has a couple of big successes he’s really psyched about but that gets followed up by him overstepping his boundaries and getting cut back down to size, so really that’s something that stretches over the first 13 episodes.
 

Describe Dov in one sentence.

He’s very excited, very dedicated and he likes to have fun.
 

What’s the appeal of Rookie Blue for cop show fans and cop show virgins alike?

Well I can tell you what the appeal was for me. It was that it’s a cop show that’s completely character driven, quirky characters. From the bad guys; we’re not fighting drug dealers and big crime syndicates or anything like that, the bad guys are people that on another day you might root for, they’re just in a tough situation right now. Also, the comedy for me is really, really important. It’s not slapstick comedy, it’s just really fun.  
 

How hard is it to balance the comedy with the more serious side of the show?

It was very difficult. Our biggest challenge was finding the tone of the show. The simplest way I can explain the tone to people is to say you’ll be smiling and laughing when the guns are in the holsters and it’s deadly serious when the guns are drawn.
 

What skills do you think are needed to be a really good cop?

Being a cop is just about personality and people and learning how to read people in certain situations. All the technical stuff, from what they’ve told me not from my experience, the handcuffs with enough training you can learn, the procedures, the protocol you can learn, but the quality that distinguishes great policemen is their ability to handle a whole range of people.
 

Why did you want to play a cop?

It was because I watched so many cop shows.
 

What’s your favourite cop show?

My favourite is one that is not at all like our show, couldn’t be more different, but probably The Wire.

Rookie Blue continues every Sunday at 10pm. You can also enter our competition to win a Rookie Blue poster signed by Gregory and his co-star Missy Peregrym (aka Andy McNally).

Written by Universal Channel

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