has brought a lot of herself to her portrayal of tough-as-nails Melissa Schemmenti on , particularly her Sicilian upbringing and the experiences of her teacher mother. This latest season also saw her character get closer to fellow instructor Jacob Hill, played by Chris Perfetti, whom Walter has invited over for holidays. The most recent batch of episodes packed in a lot of plot given the reduced order as a result of the strikes, and for Schemmenti that means a deeper exploration of romantic entanglements, including rejecting a proposal from vending machine guy Gary (Bruno Amato) and getting it on with a fire captain (Mike O’Malley).
Walter, in the middle of making banana cake, hopped on a Zoom with to discuss accents, Bradley Cooper, and being embraced by Philly. We all pretty much had a beat on our characters from the beginning. It helped that [show creator Quinta Brunson] knew exactly who these people were and communicated that to us.
There are things that we each bring individually to the characters. Personally, for me as Melissa, I am Sicilian, so I was able to zhuzh some of the slang. I always wanted to give my relatives a name when they would say, “My cousin blah, blah, blah.
” I’m like, “Can it be, like, ‘My cousin Frankie’?” And I kept using names of my actual family. I like to say I never thought I’d be a movie or a television actress. I thought, if I was lucky, I’d go work at the Guthrie or the Arena Stage.
I’d be a member of a great repertory c.