Sons of Anarchy’s Theo Rossi aka Juice teases the upcoming season six finale by saying ‘you haven’t seen anything yet’….
By Michael Stets — Staff Writer
Since season four of Sons of Anarchy up until this very last episode, we have seen Theo Rossi’s character, Juice, take on a whole new persona and role in the hit FX television series. The days of drinking Jolt all night and using his savvy computer-hacking skills for the club’s benefit, have been replaced with a chain of events that have left him forever changed, including: attempting suicide, helping to frame former SAMCRO president Clay Morrow for the murder of Damon Pope, suffering a severe beating at the hands of SAMCRO vice president Chibs, assaulting a cop, suffocating a female threat to the club with a pillow and standing in front of a speeding car being driven by a Byz-Lat.
He has gone from bringing comic relief, to having a steely stare and an apparent death wish. It appears the culmination of Juice’s erratic and dangerous behavior will be leading to some type of cataclysmic circumstance, before this season is all said and done.
“I’ll tell you this, and this is the most I can probably say,” Rossi said recently as a guest on Darce Side Radio (Charmings Most Wanted co-host’s MMA podcast). “You haven’t seen anything yet. You’ve literally not seen anything. I love that people are already kind of talking about it. You’ll see, next week is absolutely insane—I mean not next week—it’s actually two weeks away. I’m really excited for people to see it.
“I think that he’s… I mean… I can’t say anything Michael,” he continues carefully, so not to spoil any pertinent information. “I just think that he’s in such a strange place. I always thought that one of the most unsettling places for someone to be is kind of in the middle. I think he’s kind of in the middle. I don’t think he knows where or what direction he’s pointed, and when that happens everything becomes reactive or effective. And I think he’s just trying to navigate in this world and his answer in this chapter of the story so far, season six, is more introverted but with violence behind it.”
One of the Juice’s eerier moments this season, occurring in the last episode entitled ‘Aon Rud Pearsanta’ was actually non-violent. Before the Sons took down the prison transport to free Clay, Juice tried to reassure Jax that he wasn’t in fact crazy. It was an unsettling scene and it certainly confirmed any red flags that had already been raised about his sanity.
“So it’s funny that you say that,” Rossi says. “I didn’t really ever really think about that because I’ve been in the process of moving, so I’ve only watched it briefly. But in that talk with Jax, it is funny, because it’s almost scarier. It’s like when you tell someone you’re not crazy. It’s like ‘I’m not crazy.’ When people say that, they usually are absolutely bananas. Normal people don’t address that they are not crazy because that means that they are thinking it. That’s good, that’s like a major discovery I just made,” he concluded with a laugh.
Another moment adding to the crux of Juice’s fall from grace, was when Clay hugged him and thanked him before he was shot to death by Jax. Juice and Clay had grown close before he would have to help aid Clay’s ouster from SAMCRO in order to preserve his standing in the MC and redeem himself for being involved in the RICO case against the club.
“And now we’ve seen what happened this week to someone who was really a huge part of that journey with Clay,” Rossi said. “There’s obviously going to be a big change and kind of repercussions in his kind of however you want to call it, descent, ascent, whatever it is. So that’s why I believe starting next week you will see a whole different thing.”
The New York actor wears his trademark Mohawk six months of the year to play his role for the fictional outlaw biker gang residing in Charming, California. He admits to getting weird looks, or people not recognizing it’s him, but saying he looks like ‘that guy from Sons of Anarchy.’ He cuts his own hair to mold into his role as Juice, save for the final shave and fake tattoos that are placed on the sides of his head. He is proud of what he has accomplished on the show, and being able to step into the forefront this season is something he is very grateful for.
“I think it’s pretty cool,” he said. “I’m so honored to kind of have that character because I think Juice—like Tig in a way—he has really been able to circle all of the emotions. He started off as the funny guy, making the jokes, the loyal dog, and then went into this kind of comedy of errors if you want to say, that really turned into this really downtrodden, depressive mode and then he was all isolated and the Clay thing started and his reaction now has been violent. It’s pretty cool. I’ve been really lucky. I haven’t really seen many characters written where you get to play the full gamut of emotions. It’s been great. I’m super thankful to Kurt for that.”
Rossi said show creator and writer Kurt Sutter let’s himself and the other actors in on “the broad strokes” of where certain plot points are going to go, but he knew “something was going down” with his storyline from what happened in season 5 and early on in this season and that it would evolve much further.
“The way it’s been with Juice… God it’s so hard to talk about certain things,” he pauses again to make sure he isn’t going to reveal anything. “The way it’s been with Juice, he’s always been kind of navigating on the outside of things, but being a really integral part of it. I knew after the set up of Clay last year, in the house with Gemma, and how that affected him. And then mainly what I knew was after the beating from Chibs in the first episode, and this look that was written about him at the end how he’s kind of gone. ‘He’s gone’ was basically the notes on him. He’s just gone. He’s in another place now.
“I knew that eventually there would be things that would happen, and slowly throughout the season, like you said—which I thought really just shows how great our fans are. That scene with the car coming at him is such a subtle move. It’s subtle. If you blink miss it and you realize that he’s doing things like that. You realize that he’s attacking cops and then dropping his bike back and not really caring if he lives or dies. And there were a lot of things that led up to that, with the strangling of the girl with the pillow and the looks that kind of accompany that.”
As the plot line for Juice promises to hit a crescendo within the last couple of episodes this season, this season’s chapter on SAMCRO as a whole, will also come to a close. Sutter may shock us with something, tie up loose ends, or leave us with a cliffhanger, but it won’t be without meaning or purpose.
“I think that Kurt said it really right on Twitter,” Rossi said. “He said ‘before you say anything about this season, before you comment on it, before you give your opinions, watch the entire season.’ Not that it’s not like that every season, but this season everything leads up to something and means something and there’s pay offs, mainly within the last and final parts of the season,” he continued. “This is the hardest season I’ve ever had to talk about or do interviews about, because truly… It’s not like every week where we are like ‘ok so on last week’s this happened, and it happened because of this.’ It kind of all leads up to something, if that makes sense. Like the whole thing with everybody is leading up to something.”
Listen to the entire interview with Theo Rossi below (beginning at the 17:00 mark)
