-A lot of people went a little bit crazy over the summer
as they waited to go back to work.
I was doing my show. I wasn't getting my hair cut.
And as it got longer, I realized there was one thing
I was aiming for, which was to have
your hair from "Pretty in Pink."
-Well, you set the bar pretty low, didn't you?
-As it got longer -- and I feel like -- be honest --
I think I did pretty good in the end.
-Uh... [ Sighs ] [ Laughter ]
I think it looks like -- I mean, okay.
I mean, it's not a -- it looks a little bit --
It looks as much like Steve Bannon
as it looks like me there. -It's really hurtful,
what you just said. -Yeah.
[ Laughter ]
-I will say, certainly I have a higher hairline
than you were rocking in the '80s.
When you were playing Steff, did you know
how iconic a look this was going to be?
-I still don't think it is, really.
-Yeah. I would argue, this is...
And you've played some really good villains.
I mean, you played Ultron, and yet I still think
Steff is the most villainous person you've ever played.
-He's sort of a [Bleep], isn't he?
-[ Laughing ] Yes.
The suit -- They nailed the suit.
My hair let me down, but, come on,
give it up for my wardrobe department.
-I thought that the most interesting thing about --
or really the interesting thing about him was
he seemed like he was 10 years too old
to be hanging around a high school.
-He did seem a little -- -It seemed like
maybe he graduated or dropped out years ago...
-Well, that was the thing -- -...which I had.
[ Laughter ] -Right.
When I was aiming for Steff, I sort of realized
it had been a long time since I'd seen "Pretty in Pink."
And then I realized -- I think, in my head,
I thought the same thing, looking at the photo.
I'm like, "This can't be a high schooler."
We can't be meant to believe that.
-It's not, really. I don't think it is.
I said to John Hughes, who had written it --
I said, "I'm just playing it like he's just hanging around."
-[ Laughs ]
You guys did a really cool thing
because -- again, tough circumstances --
you had to shut down.
Can you explain the decision to make --
like, basically, the show became --
there was an animated element to "The Blacklist."
-We had shot a third -- close to a half of episode 19,
I guess, and we --
you know, we didn't have anything do with the footage.
And we weren't going to be able to end the series.
Our series is serialized.
And we had left some things hanging in an unfortunate way
if we just stopped.
And we wanted a way to also not only give our audience,
who has been so incredibly faithful to us,
and still continued to be curious after many years --
so we felt we should give them some sort of satisfaction
for the end of the season, and then also to be able
to lead into the next season effectively.
Yet we had no way to shoot, to film.
But there had been a comic book, which I haven't seen.
I've seen imagery from it, but there had been a sort of comic
that had been made or a graphic novel sort of thing.
-Graphic novel, right.
-And our show is a sort of comic.
I mean, it really -- It's not this world at all.
It's a sort of parallel universe, you know?
And it has a lot of the sort of, I think, sort of comic tropes.
[ Chuckling ] You know? -Sure.
-So we thought it might be sort of fitting.
And it just so happened that somebody in our production --
might have been John Eisendrath or something --
had a friend or a relative or something
that worked at an animation house
that did a lot of previsual stuff for films and so on.
And you know, to really do it, you know,
you would want to give someone, you know, half a year.
I mean, months, really, to do it probably.
But they were able to be able to do a sort of -- an animation
that was more like sort of a moving graphic novel.
And -- And so we decided to finish the episode
and sort of tweak it in a way
that would allow for the season to end in some fashion
and to kick us into the beginning of the next season,
this year. And the one collateral effect
of it was that we had these episodes
that were the sort of climactic end of season 7
that were now going to be the beginning of 8.
So this season 8 really kicked off
with a lot of, like, dire circumstances,
and still continue to be very dire.
I mean, you saw the clip that we showed.
That was pretty much all we could show
of this episode that's airing
without, you know, either giving something away
or sort of, you know -- or it would just be confusing
because you're right in the middle
of something very sort of dramatic.
-Well, it's very nice to have the show back.
It's very impressive what you all managed to pull off.
And thank you so much for making the time.
Thanks for being here in person. -Thank you.
-This is, I think, your 10th time here.
This is a big deal. -It is?
-Yeah. -Well, every one of them
has been a pleasure. -Let's keep the streak going.
"The Blacklist" airs Friday nights at 8:00 p.m. here on NBC.