If you’ve seen the commercial promoting William Petersen’s final episode of “C.S.I.” (and if you’ve had a TV tuned in to CBS at any point in the last few weeks, you can’t possibly have missed it), then you know that the character of lab tech David Hodges earns an emotional moment with Gil Grissom, proclaiming, “The bad guys will win more if we don’t have you.”
Having seen Grissom’s farewell in its entirety, I can tell you that the entire scene between Grissom and Hodges is so great that you’ll find yourself wondering who Wallace Langham had to bribe to get such a wonderful moment in such a momentous episode.
“Every day’s a gift here at ‘C.S.I.,’ I’m telling you,” says Langham, with a grin.
In all seriousness, the show’s writers came up with the idea of Hodges’ emotional farewell to Grissom, and they couldn’t wait to tell Langham about it. “The character that they thought would be the most devastated about Grissom leaving would be Hodges, so they let me play that out,” said Langham. “And I tried to be as human as I possibly could in the context of Hodges, because he doesn’t always get those opportunities. He never gets within ten feet of an emotion. That part wasn’t necessarily that hard to play, but it was still weird for me, just because, as Hodges, I don’t really get to play it that often!”
As it happens, however, the shoot turned out to be a rough one for Langham for reasons beyond those of Petersen’s departure.
“It was a really tough day to shoot for all the usual reasons,” said Langham, “but, sadly, my father was passing away…and, actually, after we had finished filming, I got the call that he had died. It wasn’t a surprise, but…you know, I knew that would be the day, oddly enough. Once I got the call where they said, ‘Okay, you’re going to be shooting on the 10th,’ I just had a feeling. I thought, ‘Okay, the irony of life has always served me well,’ and true to form, it was a very heavy day on all levels.”
