Jeremy Sisto Breaks Down Jubal’s Darkest Twist Yet in 'FBI' Fall Finale (Exclusive)
- - Jeremy Sisto Breaks Down Jubal’s Darkest Twist Yet in 'FBI' Fall Finale (Exclusive)
Lauren PiesterDecember 15, 2025 at 9:03 PM
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Bennett Raglin/CBS
It's been a while since FBI put ASA Jubal Valentine (Jeremy Sisto) through the wringer. But the Season 8 midseason finale gave him a whole lot to do — and a lot to freak out about.
In the tense two-parter, the agents in the New York field office discovered that the city was under threat from a terrorist group determined to reset the rotten world by causing mass casualties. They blew up buildings, took down phone networks and internet access, and sent messages encouraging the entire city to evacuate through tunnels, which they then planned to gas.
The FBI had their hands full as the group wrought havoc all over the city, and so of course, that was the day Jubal's son Tyler (Caleb Reese Paul) was visiting with his friend. He got the friend in a cab and on her way home just in time for him to get caught up in the explosion, leaving Jubal to find him on the ground, injured and unconscious.
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Despite Isobel's (Alana de la Garza) strict instructions to stay at the hospital with his comatose son, Jubal did what Jubal tends to do when his family is in danger. He took matters into his own hands and tracked down one of the suspects, who was getting medical help in a plastic surgeon's office, which was the perfect place to restrain the guy and poke him right in the fresh bullet wound.
Fortunately, Maggie (Missy Peregrym) and OA (Zeeko Zaki) arrived before he went too far, and he was soon back to solving problems the normal, legal way. He even got a moment to redeem himself by saving the terrorist group leader from his own lethal gas. The immediate threat was stopped, Tyler woke up, and the episode ended on Jubal's relieved laughter.
It's a happy ending for now, but things could have gone very differently. While we wait for the show's midseason return, here's what Sisto had to say about Jubal's emotional journey and filming yet another terrorist attack on New York.
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What's your first thought when you get a script like this and see that Jubal is in the hot seat? I get excited. It's been a really fun year, great cases, great stuff, but Jubal…his personal stuff has not come into it. So I was starting to wonder. Those kinds of episodes are always fun. They're different, and for an actor, that becomes, "How do I make this all work for this character that I've been playing for a long time?" And then when you see how far it goes, you start thinking, "Okay, how am I going to make this the same guy? This is a guy that would never behave in this way in other moments, so how do we find our way into really justifying what happens in this?" And it obviously comes from the emotion he has towards what happens.
What's it like for you to film stories like this, about deadly terror attacks, in New York City, especially when your character is dealing with loved ones being affected? I was here during 9/11, and we all saw the imagery of people covered in ash, running away and towards the horrible situation, trying to find loved ones, and all the emergency service people heroically running into ground zero and saving lives. We have to do these stories a lot because that's what the FBI does. They are the first line against these threats really affecting our way of life. But whenever they come up, Jubal is often in the JOC, so there's a little bit of a distance that he's able to keep from some of the horrors that our field agents have to live through. So it's fun as an actor to play that stuff, and it's fun knowing everything that Jubal is, and all of his demons. He's a complicated person, so it always brings up the possibility of his own psychology becoming part of the story again. As an actor, it is definitely fun to play.
We've seen before where Jubal goes rogue, but this was pretty extreme. How do you view what he chose to do in this situation? Yeah, that whole pressing on the wound thing, that wasn't in the script. But that's pretty bad. You can't do that in real life. But the danger is so big that I think he's going to not have to deal with too many consequences on this one. Look, after 9/11, some stuff happened that was maybe not within the ethical lines that we need to commit to, so that's kind of what happened in this situation. He was motivated by the mother of his child to put that emotion into getting vengeance, and that's an emotion that shouldn't be—legally cannot be—part of [the work]. You don't want vigilante justice. It works out well in this case, but I don't think it did anything either. I mean, ultimately how Jubal figures out the next clue is from something [the bad guy] accidentally says, but not because he was so hard on him. So it didn't actually do anything. And I think it's an interesting thing. I think we see Jubal coming back around at the end to who he is, when he decides to turn around and save [another bad guy]. But that sense of righteous justice and vengeance, that's a real common human emotion that motivates some really good things in life—rebelling against dictatorships or fighting against oppressors—and is a similar emotion to someone who is a murderer killing someone who they think has wronged them. So it's a dangerous emotion. It's something that Jubal doesn't believe in operating from, but he kind of loses his way for a moment.
I know these characters have to compartmentalize as part of this job, but this was a pretty major attack on the city. Do you think we'll see future effects of it? Even just with Jubal, I'm not sure we've seen other family members quite so involved…Yeah, well, we did have a kidnapper put a gun to my son's head once.
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True. Your son has been through it. He's been through a lot. Listen, we're not going to get into it in the show because it's not on HBO, but all law enforcement agents need to take their mental health very seriously. The human mind is geared towards not handling trauma in the most effective way, and so Jubal—with his 12 step programs and commitment to his own self awareness—is going to get through this. He's gotten through all of the stuff, or most of the stuff, without falling out of his sweet spot. He's a pretty self-aware guy, but there's always the chance with Jubal in particular, because of his inclination towards addiction. It's always something to keep an eye on. I think I'll make it through this one, but we'll see. From what I hear from the people who've seen it, it does resonate pretty deeply.
There have been some really intense cases this season. Do you feel like they're getting increasingly bigger and more impactful for the characters? What I love is that we're talking about them like they're real people, and that's what you want from a show. But it's also really important to us that when people watch the show at the end of their day working, or whatever else, that they can lose themselves in the story. We've always had a crazy amount of awful things occur. Obviously the FBI's biggest job is preventing the [crimes] before they get out of hand, and they do that quite well in real life. But that's not the show we're making. And I think after last season when, you know, the Chinese government almost took over…It's always huge stuff. You have to know that the story that we're telling is that these are all the possibilities of horrible things that occur, all the possibilities of people that are evil or emotionally unhinged or are just making bad decisions that could really upend. And sometimes there are smaller stories as well, but yeah, there's been some big ones recently. Obviously, this is a big one. The end of last season was huge. During these big episodes, you're going to see some of the biggest dangers that the FBI would have to face, and it's a harrowing exploration into that. But it also makes you stop thinking about your own life, right? That's the point of entertainment: for a second, [you can be] thoroughly caught up and inspired by the stories that you're watching on TV.
FBI returns to Mondays on CBS on Feb. 23, 2026.
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This story was originally published by Parade on Dec 16, 2025, where it first appeared in the TV section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
