Quote:Grimm Star Claire Coffee on the Big Season 5 Finale

May 20, 2016 – 10:05 AM
By Paulette Cohn

It’s been an emotional season for Adalind (Claire Coffee) on Grimm. She fell in love with Nick (David Giuntoli) after they started living together following the birth of their baby Kelly, she regressed back to being a Hexenbiest, and now she is being forced to live with Sean Renard (Sasha Roiz) in order to be with her daughter Diana (Hannah R. Loyd), who turns out to have even more extraordinary powers than originally thought.

Tonight is the two-hour Season 5 finale, featuring a deadly showdown between Black Claw and Nick, Monroe (Silas Weir Mitchell), Hank (Russell Lee), Wu (Reggie Lee), Trubel (Jacqueline Toboni), Rosalee (Bree Turner), and Eve (Bitsie Tulloch) with a surprising end result, even as Renard makes an unexpected move.

Parade.com spoke to Coffee about the relationship between Adalind and Nick, what’s up with Diana, whose side is Renard really on, and more — all without any spoilers to ruin tonight’s episode. Check it out.

Adalind had been wishing that she wasn’t a Hexenbiest, so she could be with Nick, but now that Black Claw has her daughter, does she feel that maybe she needs to be a Hexenbiest to protect Diana?

I don’t think there’s that. I think she realizes that Black Claw is far more powerful than anything she could do on her own as a Hexenbiest. But the outlook, to her, is also bleak because in order to protect her daughter, she has to fall in with Black Claw, which she doesn’t want to be doing.

When we see Diana use her powers, it’s her eyes that change. She doesn’t woge. So is she a Hexenbiest like her mother?

She appears to be some entirely new Wesen. We’re not quite sure what the Hexenbiest and Zauberbiest combination has created. But yes, it’s something different entirely and, so far, a lot more powerful than a Hexenbiest.

Diana is very young. She sees things in black and white, not gray. How is Adalind going to teach her when it’s appropriate to use her abilities? Because she does something very shocking in this episode.

With what she does in this episode, I think Adalind has really been the only one who has been trying to warn people, “Look, we don’t know how powerful she is. We don’t know the extent of her powers.” Especially after seeing what Diana is capable of when she has motivation, or rather, a typical child’s temper tantrum.

She exercises that tantrum to such disastrous ends. So, I think, she has Diana’s ear, and Diana trusts her, but she’s going to have to figure out a way, if possible, to get through to her and teach her right and wrong.

And yet at the same time, Adalind asks her to do something with her powers to help her out. So there is a plus side to Diana having the extraordinary powers.

Yeah, and I think that’s going to be the relationship that they’re building. They’re mother and daughter, but they haven’t had a great chance to establish what that relationship is, or Adalind’s parenting skills and how she’s going to parent this very special child, because they were just reunited.

But I think in that moment when Adalind asks her to use her astral projection capabilities, you see that Diana wants to protect her mother and wants to do right by her mother really more than anything else, so that mother-daughter bond is definitely there.

Nick and Adalind have quite the history. What would you like to see happen for them?

I try not to think, “Oh, what would I like to see?’ because it’s so different for me as an actress vs. for Adalind. I think what Adalind would like is to be back with Nick, be happy, and be able to establish a family with him. I think Adalind firmly believes that Nick and company are on the right side, and she wants to be, too. She doesn’t want to go back to her evil roots, and she doesn’t want to be working with Black Claw. So she’d like to be back with them, and so at this point, it’s just figuring out a way to get back there.

What do you think is up with Sean? A part of me wants to think he’s going along with Black Claw so he can be the inside man, but then he actually seems to be really on their side.

I think he believes that in this Black Claw world, he could be incredibly powerful. And he buys into their idea that Wesens should be out in the open in the real world with their more primal way of being. I think from the very beginning, the pilot episode, he’s always been working on the more sinister side and doing evil deeds. He forged the tenuous alliance with Nick, but he’s definitely now getting back to his roots and showing his true character.

Adaline wants to teach Dianna right from wrong. But, again, in order to escape Bonaparte (Shaun Toub), who is so powerful, could she consider using her daughter’s powers to escape?

I think that option will be explored, I would think, next season.

Did they make you promise not to have any more babies since it affects story?

I would promise them that, because I am so grateful. Adaline’s second pregnancy was to work with my own real-life pregnancy. I was so skeptical at first, saying, “You guys don’t need to do this. This is ridiculous,” but they actually turned a really great storyline out of it. I worked up until I was nine months pregnant. You really do want to just take a load off as much as you can, so so it helped that I wasn’t having to pretend like I wasn’t pregnant, because I probably would’ve had to be running through the woods at three in the morning.

What’s really interesting is we didn’t like Adalind in Season 1, but now we’re rooting for her.

My character’s had such a journey. She had powers, lost powers, gained powers, lost powers. And now she has the powers, doesn’t want what the powers bring along with them, but is using her powers for good.