Jesse Lee Soffer on His 'Cathartic' Return to 'Chicago P.D.' After Season 10 Exit

1 year ago

Jesse Lee Soffer Returns to Chicago P.D. After retiring as Detective Jay Halstead earlier this season, this time he's back as a first-time director. Soffer Left P.D. as a series regular after the October 5 episode. Although it's his first time rejoining the OneChicago family since then, he said Homecoming was satisfying.

"It was an amazing event. I was really excited to do it and I'm so grateful to everyone at Wolf [Entertainment] for giving me the opportunity," Soffer told ET via Zoom. "We had a great time. It was very nice talking to everyone. It was very cathartic. And be back with the family again."

The 38-year-old admitted he "absolutely" misses the scenes with his ex-PD co-stars, leaving the door open to a possible return to camera.

"As far as that, never say never," Soffer said. "Halstead's always going to be in my blood. It was 10 years as that guy. I love that cast and that crew so much because you have to be a family. You're working in rugged conditions in the winter and you're trying to crank these episodes out and there's 20 of them or 22 of them every year. And you go through all the blood, sweat and tears together. So it was fun to get to be on the other side of things and to play that game with everybody."

The actor directs Wednesday's tense episode, 'Deadlocked', begins with a case earlier in the season and sees Voight (Jason Beghe) speak up for ASA Chapman (Sara Bues) during a trial drug ringleader Arturo Morales (Robby) Ramos). When a juror is harmed midway through a case, Voight and his team will work behind the scenes to make sure justice is served.

"I was very nervous leading up to the episode," Soffer shared, revealing he found out he was assigned this episode just a few days before beginning prep. "It was definitely nerve-wracking."

"But once I got the outline and I got to see that it was this old school P.D. episode where it's Voight going off the rails and he's a man on fire, doing his Voight thing, I was like, 'Oh. Well, this I know. This thing I got in spades,'" he recalled. "So it was very confidence-building once I got that. And then we just got to have fun. We just got to do a throwback to the early days of P.D."