Grimm Post Mortem: David Giuntoli on Why the Juliette-Renard Infatuation Is 'My Fault' (2025)

Grimm Post Mortem: David Giuntoli on Why the Juliette-Renard Infatuation Is 'My Fault' (1)

Warning: If you haven’t watched Grimm‘s midseason premiere, avert your eyes now. Everyone else, proceed…

Grimm‘s big return Friday night was enough to put hair on your face paws chest.

Nick knows that Renard woke Juliette up! Nick knows that Renard is half Wesen! Renard had the key and then gave it back to Nick because… now they’re kinda on the same side? And don’t even get us started on Juliette and Renard’s pistol-whipping make-out session and Adalind’s creepily crafty comfort sex – and its shocking result.

TVLine chatted with Grimm star David Giuntoli about the NBC drama’s return – which ended with Nick writhing and turning fuchsia on the Spice Shop floor – and what’s ahead for his gang of Grimmsters.

TVLINE | That was quite an action-packed return.
It’s a good episode to come back with. It’s probably one of our most revealing episodes.

TVLINE | Nick deals with a lot in this episode. When he sees Juliette and Renard kissing in the doorway and then moving inside, what’s going through his head?
Guys do this thing – I don’t know if women do it – where it’s way easier to be angry than really broken and sad. It’s probably healthier. So that’s what he’s doing. That’s what’s going on in Nick’s head right there.

TVLINE | And what’s going on inside the house is actually probably crazier than what he’s imagining. There’s gunplay!
Yeah. He didn’t imagine that. Though… I end up going in there and seeing what the hell happened. Not really knowing what did happen, but knowing something happened. I had no idea what was going on. I just knew I didn’t want that man in my house.

TVLINE | When he talks to Juliette after, when Wu is at the house, it seems like Nick is a little less angry with her; by that point, he knows that maybe she wasn’t in total control of her actions. You play it sort of borderline.
Ultimately at the heart of all of this, I always have to remember: my fault. My fault for all this. I could’ve simply told her, and she could have either stayed or left me… I feel so terribly for her and I’m also horribly… my ego took a beating, so I’m angry.

TVLINE | Elsewhere, Adalind is out of jail now and back to causing big trouble.
Adalind kind of goes off in her own evil schemy world soon, and it involves me much less until — I’m sure — the end of the season where its going to again come to some major cliffhanger.

TVLINE | The showdown between Renard and Nick –
In Portland, the way men settle scores is you go into the woods and physically fight each other. That’s exactly what Renard and I do.

TVLINE | Every single man in Portland does that, eh?
Listen, I’m not writing the rules. [Laughs] I don’t know if that’s what they do in Portland; that’s what we do. That’s what we did. It was a huge, epic, [and] really enjoyable to film and it looks great. It was a big kerfuffle that it all came down to.

TVLINE | Highly choreographed?
Yeah man, and it looks great, but let me assure you: The first seven run-throughs were like two drunken black bears at the circus clumsily mauling each other by accident. It was not the prettiest thing. I kneed Sasha Roiz in the face, hard… and he, like, horse-kicked me with his size whatever dress shoe and I had this bruise. It looked like I got kicked by a giraffe. You know how they have that powerful kick? It was huge. A huge bruise from my knee to my — yeah, it was bad.

TVLINE | At one point you hit him and you can tell that he’s at least part Wesen – which is something Nick didn’t know before.
Yeah. That’s a big reveal. He’s always had the goods on me, and now I have the goods on him. We both know about each other and we work with each other, but he trusts me about as much as I trust him – which is not much.

TVLINE | He’s seen the inner sanctum now. He’s been in the trailer.
He’s seen it all. Here’s the thing: We’re going to have big enemies to fight and we don’t necessarily like each other, but we equally need to dislike the same people. So our relationship’s going to be one of those we-have-the-same-enemies relationships, but we’re not friends.

TVLINE | Somehow, his shirt didn’t come off during the fight.
That man has been shirtless so much… Astonishingly, his clothing stayed on during the fight.

TVLINE | Rosalee mixes up a potion for you. It looks disgusting, by the way.
It’s [so] grotesque – it’s somewhere between Go-Gurt and human eye, what I drank. I don’t know what it is, but it does not taste good. I think it was dairy-based in some very far away way. But it was the gross potion I drank to reverse the spell, in a way… It’s the potion that [Renard] drank when he ripped his shirt off – though I don’t rip my shirt off.

TVLINE | Assuming that Nick survives this episode, will he have to be around Juliette and Renard having residual feelings?
You’ll have to watch on that one. I don’t think I can say that.

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