Warning: Contains SPOILERS for The Equalizer season 5, episode 7.
The fall finale ofThe Equalizeraired Sunday, December 8, and saw McCall, Dante, and Miles fight for their lives after the cartel took over a hospital. Although there were several close calls, the characters made it out alive with the help ofLiza Lapira’s Mel, who was posted on a nearby rooftop. Season 5, episode 7, “Slay Ride,” is action-heavy, but the holiday-themed installment features plenty of character-driven moments.
After discovering that Mel has been playing his guitar, Harry finally gives his wife the perfect Christmas present. He gifts her a guitar of her own, and she performs the song she composed about her post-traumatic stress. Lapira, whowrote the original tune, was excited about how the series chose to close out Mel’s arc. The actor shares that the lyrics are meant to relate to her character’s time in the military, as well as other trauma victims who are figuring out how to move forward.
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ScreenRantinterviews Lapira about writing and performing Mel’s song in the fall finale, what to expect whenThe Equalizerseason 5returns, and voicing Disgust inInside Out 2.
Lapira Wanted Mel’s Song To Resonate With Trauma Victims In The Equalizer Season 5
“They did the right things that society told them to do, and it still didn’t work out, and they’re still stuck with the pain.”
ScreenRant: So much happened during the mid-season finale ofThe Equalizer. What were your thoughts after you read the script?
Liza Lapira: I loved the closure of my arc. I had seen it coming down the pike. My bosses told me about the song because we’d been kind of layering it in to set up the song at the end. I knew it was coming because I wrote the song, and I had a deadline to get it done. And so when I finally got the episode and saw where the song was going to be and the action with the hospital and the whole concept of the two love interests being together. It was action-packed. I loved the whole thing, and I found it heartwarming.
Can you give some insight into the songwriting process and how you related the lyrics to Mel?
Liza Lapira: I knew that the premise was Mel writing a song about her post-traumatic stress. She’d gone to therapy several times. With her, obviously, it related to her experience in the military and the aftermath of that decades later. But then I also thought about other situations that involve trauma, assault, discrimination—any injustices where the victim of the trauma has done everything right. They wore the right thing, they set the right boundaries, they said the right things, and yet the trauma has come to them. And well, what then? There was kind of no cause and effect.
The person was truly innocent, and they did the right things that society told them to do, and it still didn’t work out, and they’re still stuck with the pain. And so from there, this concept of, “I did everything right. What now?” came up, and that’s the premise of the song. I didn’t know how the song was going to end until I wrote it. I didn’t know the answer to “What now?” when I started writing it.
And it was only after I wrote it that I looked back, and I saw, “Oh, you just choose to live. You just agree to live. You soldier on. You declare, ‘I’m going to live. And you know what? I do a few things right.'” It’s facetious. It’s like, “I do okay. I’m doing all right. I’m a strong person.” So that’s how it came out. And to be honest, we had shot the scenes where I’m writing lyrics on the napkins, we’d shot that maybe a month or two before. I just kind of made the first line up on the spot, and then, thank goodness, those lyrics ended up being in the song. I had built off what I wrote earlier.
I really had nothing, and I had a scratch pad, and I thought, “Well, okay. I wrote, ‘If I were to tell you where I’ve been, would that make it right?’ Let me see if I can keep writing that.” And I did. So it’s kind of to her therapist. It’s all for therapy. Like, “If I tell you everything that happened, is that going to heal me? If I stop thinking about it and leave myself alone, is that going to heal me?” And the answer is, “I have to decide to work on it, and I have to choose it for myself.”
Would you ever like to see Mel perform her music in front of an audience?
Liza Lapira: Yes, in the bar. I had talked to the showrunners about that and the EPs about maybe the reveal being on stage. I think they said they were considering that, but they chose to have it be a more intimate moment, which I think works. It really was lovely doing it in the sanctum with me and Adam [Goldberg], and it was just a lovely moment between the two of our characters. So I think they chose the absolute right way to debut this song, and they left the door open to have Mel sing this or something else at her bar now that she has the open mic nights.
Lapira Believes Mel And Harry Have An Aspirational Relationship In The Equalizer
Harry has been notoriously not great at giving Christmas gifts, but do you think he finally hit the nail on the head with the guitar this year?
Liza Lapira: He did. He gave me the right gift with the right intentions. It wasn’t just the guitar, it was the gift of giving me space to let it out.
I love Harry and Mel. They have such a supportive relationship. When I spoke to Adam a few weeks ago, he actually said, “Sometimes I feel Harry can be supportive to a fault.” [Laughs] Is there anything about their relationship that you would like to see addressed?
Liza Lapira: I like that we’re each other’s safety net. I think it’s aspirational. It mirrors what justice is in this show. We all know there’s not a hundred percent of justice a hundred percent of the time. Some days it feels like quite the opposite. So the show’s escapism is aspirational, and I think that’s why it did so well and why it resonates with so many people. And so parallel to that is this marriage—it’s aspirational.
I wish everybody had a husband as supportive or a wife as supportive, so I’d like to see that continue, but I’d like to see Harry get out more with Mel. We had that arc at the beginning where he went out a lot because I stepped down, and now I’m out a lot, and he’s not. But I don’t think we’ve had a full season where both of us are going full throttle at the same time. I think that would be fun.
Mel’s been going through a lot, but she’s found a lot of healing through therapy. How do you feel about her storyline and how it’s played out during season 5?
Liza Lapira: I’m so excited about the storyline. I think mental health awareness, taking care of one’s mental health is very much in the ether now, thank goodness. I think showing such a strong bad*ss, literally, a killer character, go through something so vulnerable is poetic and fun to watch. I love the arc of her being resistant to therapy because that’s still the case. Even though mental health awareness is in the ether, there’s still a lot of old-school stigma to people who go like, “Why don’t you just fix it on your own?”
We don’t do that with physical ailments, so it’s a little confounding that we would expect that with mental or emotional issues. And I like that she was resistant, and then I like that she slowly takes the advice of her therapist and that she comes through it. And I like that when she does come through it and rejoins the team, that it’s not cut and dry. She slips and maybe has a bit of a panic attack or maybe questions what she’s doing, and that mirrors real life.
You don’t just get better. You don’t go, “Okay, the grief is done now.” It’s up and down, up and down. I make this one step forward, two steps back sometimes. So I really like that. And I like that she took the advice of her therapist. There’s a little bit of art therapy going on—using your creativity to heal. I’m a big believer in writing and journaling. I like those programs where they go into senior centers or women’s shelters or prisons and they say, “Hey, write down your story.”
I think it’s cathartic. It’s healing. So I like that. I like that she wrote a song and she took some words that she actually took from therapy and put it in the lyrics. So that helped me a lot too. There’s a line about “Fix the broken cracks with gold,” and in her very first session, the therapist talks about kintsugi, the Japanese pottery where they take the cracks and instead of glue, they use gold. So the gold shows the idea is not to hide the cracks, it’s to highlight the cracks, and the vase is more beautiful because of its imperfections.
Mel Will Visit Her Parents When The Equalizer Season 5 Returns
“It’s a little bit gut-wrenching. It doesn’t go well.”
With this being the mid-season finale, what can you tease about Mel’s storyline whenThe Equalizerreturns?
Liza Lapira: I am allowed to say that it’s a Mel-centered episode or storyline, and she goes and visits her parents, and it’s a little bit gut-wrenching. It doesn’t go well. Slowly by slowly, we’ve been meeting Mel’s family. I believe two seasons ago, we met two of her siblings, and then last season, we met her third sibling, her older brother, Matt. And then this season we’re meeting her parents. Next season, I don’t know, [maybe we’ll see] her grandparents or all of us together. I think that would be fun.
Are there any ideas you’ve had for Mel that you brought to the writers?
Liza Lapira: We kind of touched upon it with the Mel parents episode, but we just touched it. We didn’t really do it. In my real life, in Lisa’s real life, my parents are much older because I was a late baby. I’m the youngest of all my siblings. And so my mom was six during World War II, during Filipino occupation, and she carried a lot of trauma from the stuff that she saw. There were soldiers that would stand out in the street, and my uncles needed to go to the hospital.
They were little babies, my mother’s little brothers, and the Japanese soldiers told my grandfather he couldn’t go, and as a result, a couple of my uncles, when they were little babies, they died. And no one knows the horrors of World War II in regards to Asia. I’m from the Philippines. My descendants are, so I’ll say the Philippines, but with my other Asian friends, we talk about how that history is not really out there in the way other aspects of World War II are.
Schindler’s List was a seminal movie, thank God, to put it more in the ether, and that hasn’t really happened for the Asian American culture. Ronny Chieng from The Daily Show has in his standup special, “There’s no Schindler’s List for what happened to Asia for World War II,” but it was pretty terrible and in line with what that war did to the world. And that’s interesting to me because it uncovers a part of history that isn’t in the ether and that we don’t talk about, and our show does a good job of doing stuff like that.
We did a storyline a couple of years ago about the Tulsa massacre, and that is something not a lot of people knew about. I learned stuff from reading that episode, and we preserve our history by telling stories, even if they’re entertainment, even if they’re fun, that’s how we save our history. And so how I would bring it into 2024 and 2025, is this idea of generational trauma. There’s a study they did with descendants of Holocaust survivors, and how their DNA was literally changed by the trauma.
It was literally passed down from generation to generation. So these kids, these people, maybe our age, are affected by a war that they weren’t even alive for. So that’s so fascinating to me, and to have that in this show, maybe Mel, or maybe her cousin, I’m just spitballing, but to have someone in present-day be suffering from the effects of a war they weren’t even alive for, particularly in Asia—I find that fascinating.
Lapira Focused On Capturing Disgust’s Essence After Replacing Mindy Kaling In Inside Out 2
“I likened her to the type that always asks to speak to the manager and the type that is always judging.”
Switching gears, we’re all huge fans ofInside Out. How do you approach playing a character like Disgust inInside Out 2when the voice was already established in the first movie?
Liza Lapira: I loved the [first] movie even if I wasn’t in it. I came at it thinking about the character. I figured, they chose me, they chose Tony Hale, they knew what we sounded like, so I didn’t have to do anything or mimic vocals. Kelsey Mann, the director, made it clear that it wasn’t about matching a timber and more about getting to the essence of the character.
So I just thought about what Disgust thinks and feels, and I likened her to the type that always asks to speak to the manager and the type that is always judging. Everything is a barometer. “That’s not good enough. That’s good enough. That pasta is too soggy. Those potatoes are great.” Everything’s like, “This is good. This is not good. This is good. This is not good.” And it’s a very judgy and also a tween kind of attitude, like, “Ick, no.” And it’s all under the umbrella of protecting, right? Because it’s not just judging for judgment’s sake. It’s judging to protect.
So I just took all my tween energy, all my “asking for the manager” energy, and that changed my voice. And then I had a mannerism where I checked my hair for split ends. I’ve talked about this a lot, but Kelsey caught me looking down, kind of picking at my split ends, and it changed the way that I spoke. I wasn’t really engaging with the other person.
I was just kind of like, “Yeah, whatever.” And he said, “Lisa, what are you doing?” [Laughs] And I told him, and he fell on the floor laughing, and he said, “Okay, that’s brilliant. Do that.” So every line, he would say, “Okay, now do a split ends take.” If you just look down at your hair, and you just honestly look for it, it takes your energy. It is kind of rude to the person that you’re talking to because you’re so focused on something else. [Laughs] And then the series is coming out on December 11.
What can you share about it?
Liza Lapira: It follows the director in Dream Productions, and she’s trying to come up with the next hit, that next hit dream, and so it follows her mockumentary style, like The Office. Basically, it’s The Office in Inside Out. She’s like the Steve Carell, and she’s like, “Hey there, it’s Paula Pell. You may know me from hit dreams such as, ‘Oh No, You Forgot Your Homework,’ and now I’m going make a new dream for Riley, and it’s going to be a big hit.”
It follows her around as she tries to make this movie. I’m in it because the core emotions are still in it, even though it’s not about us. It’s about Dream Productions and the dreams. We are at headquarters kind of judging, kind of seeing the dreams and going, “Oh, that’s a cool dream,” or “What’s going on?” or, “Oh, no!” We’re monitoring the dreams. So I’m there a little bit, but it’s mostly about Paula Pell and the studio executive who is Paula Pell’s boss, played by Maya Rudolph.
About The Equalizer Season 5
Developed for television by Andrew Marlowe and Terri Miller
The Equalizeris a reimagining of the classic series starring Academy Award® nominee and multi-hyphenate Queen Latifah (“Chicago,” “Bessie”) as Robyn McCall, an enigmatic woman with a mysterious background who uses her extensive skills as a former CIA operative to help those with nowhere else to turn. McCall presents to most as an average single mom who is quietly raising her teenage daughter. But to a trusted few, she is The Equalizer – an anonymous guardian angel and defender of the downtrodden, who’s also dogged in her pursuit of personal redemption.
Check out our other interviews withThe Equalizercast:
The Equalizerreturns Sunday, February 16 at 10 p.m. ET on CBS.
The Equalizer
The Equalizer is a television reboot of the original 1985 action television series starring Queen Latifah as protagonist Robyn McCall - a mysterious woman who uses her unique set of skills to help those when all other options fail them. McCall comes across to most as an average single mom quietly raising her teenage daughter. But to a trusted few, she is “The Equalizer” - an anonymous guardian angel and defender of the oppressed fighting for her redemption regarding her own past.
