SPOILER ALERT: This post spoils the entirety of Ginny & Georgia’ Season 3.
Scott Porter’s Mayor Paul Randolph has quite the arc in Ginny & Georgia Season 3, in which he gets caught up in the cyclone that is Georgia Miller’s (Brianne Howey) murder trial.
A small taste of what he was in of occurred at the end of Season 2 when Georgia finally came clean to him about a select range of topics from her dark and sometimes questionable past — including her family trauma, her abusive ex Gil and more. But still, she did not share all of it with him.
“I’ve really been saying this word again and again for Season 3, and the word is reckoning, and it is for all of our characters. A lot of people have chosen to ignore things that maybe they should have addressed. A lot of our characters have chosen to act without thinking,” Porter told Deadline ahead of Season 3’s premiere. “A lot of our characters have not gotten help when they need it. A lot of our characters haven’t been honest with each other, and each of those actions have a consequence, and all of those consequences add up to a reckoning for almost our entire cast in Season 3.”
RELATED: ‘Ginny & Georgia’ Stars Sara Waisglass and Felix Mallard Dissect Major Moments For The Baker Twins In Season 3
Paul, who Georgia has previously described as her “knight in shining armor” also faces a fork in the road with his career on the line as Georgia’s secrets come out in the trial. Viewers see him put armor on for himself this season.
“Paul has to protect not only him and Georgia together public-facing, but he has to protect himself in some way as well, and that’s both in the relationship and politically. So if your partner continues to lie to you, at some point, you have to start to protect yourself,” Porter said. “And if your relationship starts to hurt your career, at some point you have to start to protect yourself.”
Porter unpacks Paul’s “point of no return,” in his relationship with Georgia, what is going through his character’s mind in that scene when he jogs alongside Ginny, what could be in store for Paul in Season 4 and more in the below interview. The actor and Masked Singer alum also recently reunited with his acapella group Voiceplay to record a cover of Stephen Sanchez’ “Until I Found You” to which Georgia walks down the aisle in Season 2. The music video for the song comes out today on Voiceplay’s YouTube channel.
DEADLINE: Season 2 ends on a really chaotic note. What did you want to focus on in Season 3 for Paul?
SCOTT PORTER: For Paul, I think a lot of what he dealt with over Seasons 1 and 2 is a strong confidence that he could protect the relationship of him and Georgia, but it only works if she’s open with him and honest with him, and he finds out at the worst possible moment at the end of Season 2 that she has not been upfront and honest with him. The unfortunate thing for Paul is, you’ve heard the saying, “Fool me once, fool me twice.” Well, this really starts to fall on him, because there have been a number of times that Georgia has not been honest with him or upfront with him, and he’s chosen to ignore it. He can’t ignore this any longer.
L-R: Brianne Howey as Georgia and Scott Porter as Mayor Paul Randolph in Season 2 of ‘Ginny & Georgia’
Netflix
DEADLINE: I want to talk about the pregnancy that Georgia fakes, but it seems like the sensationalism of the trial gets to him too with the serial killer allegations. Where is the breaking point for him?
PORTER: I do want to be careful, just for people who are to watch this over the weekend. As far as Paul and Georgia go, I’ve really loved playing Paul throughout the ups and downs of their relationship, because he’s really like a martial artist with the way he deals with the maelstrom of Georgia. She is a force of nature, but she has yet to topple Paul in the first two seasons. She comes to him and tells him “I slept with my ex” before he proposes. Doesn’t topple. He finds a gun in Season 2, and she comes to him and drops all of the bombs she drops on him about Gil and about her past and all of these things. He doesn’t topple. He stands stronger, almost even.
Then at the wedding, she’s arrested, and even at the beginning of Season 3, he doesn’t topple, he’s still there strong for her. But as more secrets are unearthed in the trial, more things are brought to the fore that he and Zion — and I think that’s really where alarm bells start to go off for Paul — “Oh, this isn’t just being kept from me. This is being kept from Zion.” If it’s being kept from Zion, maybe there is more to this, and maybe things are getting a little dangerous.
I think the first thing that really starts to force Paul to make decisions, to leave the house, to stay with his parents, to say goodbye to the kids, which is so heartbreaking for him. I know it is for them as well, but I do really feel that Paul truly loves those kids. For him to do that, it’s when secrets start to continue to roll out. Towards the end of the season, the true breaking point for Paul is the point of no return. It’s lying to somebody about something so personal as what she does at the end of Season 3.
RELATED: ‘Ginny & Georgia’ Stars Brianne Howey And Antonia Gentry Discuss Season 3’s Big “Heartwarming” And “Heartbreaking” Moments
I know you put it in the question. I hesitate to go too far into it, but she breaks something that I think is untouchable for Paul. You can lie to me about all this other stuff, your past, all the things that you’re hiding, that’s fine. But to lie to me about this, to lie to me about us, our family, that is just the step too far for Paul, and in that argument, that big blow up in the kitchen that they have that’s kind of like the last stand of Georgia and Paul, he still begs her to just “Let me in, just trust me.” And she says “I can’t trust you.” And you hear Paul yell, “Why?” And that’s the question I’ve had this whole time, too. “Why?” Because, if she would have, this whole thing might have turned out differently.
DEADLINE: With his job as a politician, he’s not just looking out for himself, he really is committed to Georgia and the kids. Is it fair for Paul to blame Nick, who has worked for him from Season 1, for what happens with his career at the end of Season 3?
PORTER: Towards the end of the season, Paul is blaming everyone, including himself. In this case, I think the phrase “Hurting people hurt people” is applicable to Paul. For years, the fans, yes, I see all the comments. They’ve been very pro Team Joe and all of these things, and they’ve always just been waiting for a dark side of Paul to pop out of somewhere.
A lot of people have asked me in interviews, “What is Paul hiding? Is Paul dark inside? Is Paul dangerous? Is Paul gonna make it? A lot of questions, and the honest answer is, I think Paul, and he said as much in the show, is a thoughtful person who wants to create real change, and he doesn’t want to do it in the way that his father did it, who was an old school politician, but he knows that he had to get dirty a little bit.
RELATED: Scott Porter Would “Love To Stop By” Peacock’s ‘Friday Night Lights’ Reboot “Only If It Serves The Story”
He doesn’t want a bunch of handshake deals and keeping the status quo and getting paid on the back end. That’s not what he wants to do, but he knows in order to play the game, you have to be able to get a little dirty. And he saw the perfect teammate in Georgia. He sees himself as powerful in his own right, and sees Georgia as very powerful in her own right. And that’s the perfect partnership, if you’re honest with each other.
L to R: Brianne Howey as Georgia Miller, Scott Porter as Paul Randolph in ‘Ginny & Georgia’
Amanda Matlovich/Netflix
But when it all crumbles and Paul is left standing there holding the bag, and Georgia comes out looking like a hero in some ways, and Paul looks like a villain. That really hurts him, because I think to him, he did everything he could, and now he’s taking the blame for all of it. And she gets to walk. In that moment, he is looking for someone to lash out at and someone to blame, and it’s unfortunate, but I think that’s just natural for people. Do I think that makes Paul a bad guy.?I don’t. Do I think Paul should have made some of these moves a long time ago. Probably. A lot of people ask me, “Is Paul good for Georgia?” And my answer was always, Is Georgia good for Paul?” I think we got our answer towards the end of season.
DEADLINE: There’s a scene earlier on in the show where Ginny is going on a run, and then the camera pans and you’re running beside her. What is going through Paul’s mind in that scene?
PORTER: We see a lot of people learning how to cope in this show, learning how to complete stress cycles, going to therapy. But for somebody like Paul, you never see that. He’s expected to be the mayor, to keep it together, to not show any cracks. He can’t show any signs of weakness to his own father. We see that in the show. You see that when he goes home, there’s conflict in his own parents’ house, and there’s conflict between him and his parents. So where does he turn? Who does he turn to? I thought that scene was so cool because it showed Paul trying to complete his stress cycles and keep it together for himself. The cool thing about Paul is he’s always learning. He’s always kind of evolving. And that scene, to me, showed that he was even learning from Ginny. He’s watching how Jenny is dealing with this, and he’s going, “Okay, yes, let me try this. Let me figure out if this can help me.” I love that scene. There’s no words said in it. We shot it at sundown. We had zero time to complete it. We thought we might cut it, but our showrunner, Sarah Glinski and our creator, Sarah Lampert, and [Antonia] and I and our Director of Photography all were just banging the table. We can’t lose this scene. So I’m so glad that you asked me about it, because I think it’s a pretty important scene, especially for the silent consideration between Ginny and Paul of “Hey, we’re in this together, but it’s affecting us in much different ways.”
DEADLINE: Ginny isn’t as surprised when Paul packs up and leaves, but could you talk about how that affects his relationship with Austin?
PORTER: That’s, to me, one of the most heartbreaking things of this season, because as Paul tells Georgia, “us against the world,” you want somebody who will go through everything with you. “I was that person, and you didn’t hold up your end of the bargain.” He wants to be that person for Austin as well.
He loves that kid to the ends of the earth. That was the toughest goodbye of the season for me. I think in that scene, I actually cried a couple of times in a couple of takes, and Sarah Lampert’s note to me was, “Paul has to keep it together for Austin.” But it was really hard for me as a person to hold it together. The thing about this show is, I have such massive respect for our cast, and I love working with different formations of it, but I knew that moment was the beginning of the end for me really working in the Miller house with that family core dynamic. As a human being, Scott Porter, I was feeling some type of way about it too. You’re saying goodbye to a phase of your life within this show that we are working so hard to create, and that was really tough for me.
RELATED: ‘Ginny & Georgia’ Cast Through All Three Seasons: Who Plays Who?
Working with Brianne and [Antonia] and Diesel has been awesome, and saying goodbye in the show as the character of Paul also was a little bit of me saying goodbye as Scott to “we won’t work in this dynamic again,” and that was tough to let go. Who knows, though? Paul in the show says that he tried to get custody of Austin, and he was denied. But I wouldn’t put it past him to still, even with everything that’s happened with Georgia and Paul, want to be involved in some way, especially now that he sees that Gil may possibly not be around any longer. Who’s gonna be there, who’s gonna step in for that? And I think Paul still would really love to be that guy.
DEADLINE: That was one of my questions is, are you gone? Are you back for Season 4? I was talking to Sarah, and she told me that she went into the room knowing whose baby Georgia actually does get pregnant with, and then she changed her mind. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on what that might look like?
PORTER: As Paul says, “And then there’s the baby,” to which Joe responds, “What baby?” Paul responds, “There is no baby.” I have zero idea where this is going. It was a bomb that was dropped on all of us as a cast at our final table read. I think maybe Brianne knew, but me, I had zero idea. Ray, who plays Joe, zero idea, until the moment in the table read towards the end of the script.
There were some other twists and turns that were in the final couple of scripts that are no longer there that I was surprised to see shift out as well. So I am as clueless as anybody out there as far as what Season 4 holds. That being said, I’m very excited to know that, in whatever realm, Paul and Georgia are still going to have to be in each other’s orbit for a little while. That’s exciting to me because hopefully we’ve gotten past some of the darkness of Season 3. I would love to see Paul’s resilience and how he rebounds. We already know that Georgia is capable of putting everything back together at the drop of a hat and presenting herself in a way that is unexpected and delightful and surprising, and that’s how Paul was with her in Season 1. I’m hoping we can get back to a little bit of that. It may have the undercurrent of, “I don’t like you,” but the overcurrent of, “Okay, you’re not gonna get me this time,” smiles, witty banter. That’s what I’d love to see going into Season 4, regardless of babies or lost careers or broken relationships. That’s what I want to see, a little bit more of who we are as a show, and Sarah Lampert’s voice coming to the fore between Paul and George’s interactions.
RELATED: ‘Ginny & Georgia’ Creator Unpacks Season 3 Ending And Teases Season 4 Theme
