‘Law & Order: SVU’: Corey Cott Warns Things ‘Get Heated’ During Personal Case for Griffin

This week’s Law & Order: SVU is going to get very personal for the newest member of the squad, Detective Jake Griffin (Corey Cott).

In the March 5 episode, a family picks up another frequency on their baby monitor that leads the squad to discover there’s a boy locked in a cage somewhere in the city.

“It’s like finding a needle in a haystack. We have no idea where this kid is,” Cott tells TV Insider. “The entire hour is trying to find this kid, where he is located, and find who did it and who’s locking him and keeping him in this cage. We periodically pick up the frequency and the signal of this monitor and see intermittently different things that are happening to him in this cage, which is just despicable beyond words.”

Griffin becomes very determined to find this kid because he reminds him of someone he knows. “We learn that this kid may or may not have a disability that Griff’s brother had when he was a kid. And so he is able to sort of inject personal reasons to really solve this case and wants to really save this kid, and it matters a lot to him,” Cott explains.

Virginia Sherwood/NBC

With the episode focused on finding the child, it’s not your typical SVU episode. “It becomes kind of one high-octane chase scene throughout the entire hour as opposed to a typical bringing the perp in, interviewing him, going to court kind of thing,” the newest star of the series says.

Because the case becomes personal for Griffin, he’s willing to go to extremes to find the boy. And we’ve already seen this season that he hasn’t exactly been welcomed to the squad with open arms; he was, after all, placed there by Chief Kathryn Tynan (Noma Dumezweni), with whom Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) has been clashing. He’s also used to operating in a certain way — remember, he was known as “Batman” before he came to SVU.

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“He was a bit of a cowboy. He didn’t really follow the rules. And he was successful at that,” Cott notes. “But now there’s protocol, there’s a system, there’s years and years of dynamics and the way we do things, and almost like taking your foot off the brakes a little bit to let the victims and the perps either bring themselves into guilt or release information on their own as opposed to forcing it out of them.”

However, he’s quick to point out, “This particular situation actually supports Griff’s urgency, I think, because there’s not a lot of time. We have to just do whatever we can to go find this kid as fast as we possibly can. And Griff has a leg up because he thinks he figures out a way to communicate with this kid where no one else can. But because of these dynamics of the season of Griff trying to basically bulldoze his way into everything, people are reluctant to trust his methods.”

As a result, look for things to “come to a head” in this episode. “It gets a little heated — rightfully so,” Cott adds. “Sometimes those kind of heated moments are needed in order to find success in these moments.”

What’s your take on Griffin so far? Let us know in the comments section below.

Law & Order: SVU, Thursdays, 9/8c, NBC

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