The moments Sasha Alexander and Angie Harmon still carry from Rizzoli & Isles

“This will deepen their friendship”: Inside Sasha Alexander and Angie Harmon’s favorite ‘Rizzoli & Isles’ scenes

2 weeks ago

Sasha Alexander and Angie Harmon sitting back-to-back against a red curtain, smiling toward the camera

Sasha Alexander and Angie Harmon look back at the scenes that pushed, tested, and bonded their characters — from undercover chaos to one heartbreaking goodbye.

Some scenes stay with the actors long after the cameras drop. For Sasha Alexander and Angie Harmon, the memories they hold from Rizzoli & Isles live in two registers — the goofy and the gutting.

Alexander’s pick: the fight that deepened everything

At the end of Season 2, Jane shoots Maura’s biological father — a moment Alexander still thinks about. “The network didn’t believe the fans would want to see [Rizzoli and Isles] fight,” she says. “But I remember Janet Tamaro saying, ‘This will deepen their friendship.’ It was an extremely dramatic moment but it gave us a place to go.”

She still laughs about the undercover prep scene too: “Maura was so excited she was like a kid coming out of her skin. Jane’s trying to calm her down and get the mic on her.”

Harmon’s favorites: the wild night and the hard goodbye

Harmon still loves the Season 7 premiere — sprinting barefoot across the Paramount lot in a Vivienne Westwood dress, firing guns, fully in her element. “That’s my thing,” she says.

“It was my favorite one because of the kindness that was shown to us as a show and a family.”

But the episode she returns to most is the one that laid Barry Frost to rest after the death of Lee Thompson Young. “The fans needed that kind of closure,” she says. “And we needed to be respectful to his family.”

Jane Rizzoli delivers Frost’s eulogy in the episode, but Harmon was mourning in real time. “It was very difficult to shoot; we were living it,” she says. “The fact they let us give him the proper send-off was such a blessing. Horrible as it was, it really kept my faith in the people in my industry.”

The show is remembered for friendship, casework, and breezy Boston banter — but its stars remember the pressure points, the wild nights on set, and the episode where fiction stopped pretending it wasn’t real.