Law & Order: SVU's Corey Cott Knows Griff Has An 'Uphill Battle' With Benson (And The Fans)

There have been tougher entries to the Special Victims Unit than Det. Jake Griffin's... but there have been far easier ones, as well. 

Griff, as Corey Cott's character is known, first showed up on "Law & Order: SVU" at the start of this season and instantly made Capt. Olivia Benson and her team suspicious. Did the former Manhattan South robbery cop truly have a desire to help victims of sexual assault? Or was he merely a spy, placed so that Chief of Detectives Kathryn Tynan could keep a closer eye on Benson? 

Now that we're more than halfway through Season 27, the jury's still out. "He's now starting to look at Benson as sort of a mentor," Cott tells TVLine, chuckling. "We'll see if she's willing to be that mentor for him or not."

Tonight's episode (NBC, 9/8c) may be a deciding factor: When a family's baby monitor picks up a rogue frequency that indicates a young boy is in danger, Griff won't stop until he finds the boy. 

"After this episode, this case, it's so personal to Griff that hopefully, the audience will see," Cott previews, "he really cares about justice for these victims."

Cott's previous TV work includes "Filthy Rich," "The Good Fight," "The Equalizer," "Chicago Med," and "Z: The Beginning of Everything," and Broadway fans will recognize him from musicals like "Newsies" and "The Heart of Rock and Roll." Read on for more of our chat.

TVLINE | First of all, congrats on becoming a series regular. That's a pretty big deal. And, God bless you, because Griff has an uphill climb here, right?
COREY COTT | [Laughs] It took me a minute to get accustomed to that. Because, you know, as an actor, you want to come in and please everybody and make everyone root for you. And from the get-go, I guess you said it right: uphill battle. There's a lot of tension. He's trying to balance seeking justice for these people that he's trying to defend while also serving his two bosses. But you don't know exactly — and I don't think he knows exactly — which one he has the most allegiance to throughout the season. So it's been a challenging, but also really exciting and fun, journey or arc to give him this year.

TVLINE | The fans of this show are fervent: They love OIivia Benson, and anyone who is not on #TeamBenson can be seen as the enemy. When people see you guys shooting out in New York, have you had any interactions where they're letting you know how they feel?
Not in person, thankfully. I have had that on the socials, so I had to take a little break away from looking at some of the things. Even though I assume most of it is geared toward Griff and like his potentially throwing a wrench into Benson's M.O. and her system and all that, you still go, "Oh shoot, they really are are fervently defending Benson and everything," and anything that goes against that is out, right? And so, in a way I actually ended up starting to take anytime anyone said anything negative about Griff, I was like, that's probably a good thing!

Because we want conflict, especially in a long-running show like this. And the writers are doing such a good job at injecting conflict into the 27th season and not letting it just be another run-of-the-mill procedural. There's actual drama going on within the squad room, and that makes it exciting beyond the case of the week. It's been really cool for the squad to deal with these dynamics, too, because there's just a lot more to play. Even the subtext underneath every moment, there's this tension. Bruno's going,"Is Griff spying on me?" Benson's is "Is Griff spying on me, or is [he] here honestly?" We, as actors, love to play complicated humans and tough dynamics and conflict. So that's been a great challenge.

TVLINE | I've noticed that there's something a little naive about Griff, even though he's been a cop for a while. And it feels like this new type of work is dismantling him a little bit. Do you think that's accurate?
Yeah, I think it is. We've hinted at this a bit this season, but underneath it all, he's really trying to prove something to his dad. And it's affirmation he'll never get, because his dad died when he was young. So there's this underlying thing that I connect to — and I still have my dad, thankfully, and love my dad, and he's been very supportive of me in my career my whole life — but there is this thing. I don't know if it's in men and women, but certainly in sons of fathers, to try to just always get their affirmation and want them to be proud of them.

Griff's doing whatever he can, and so he's sort of supplemented that desire for affirmation through [Chief] Tynan, cause Tynan was his closest connection to his dad. So any way he can make her proud is a win for him, whether he wants to acknowledge that or not. And then too, before SV,U he was a plainclothes, anti-crime burglary cop in Midtown, right? So he was mostly dealing with just like punks, you know? [Laughs] Punks that were doing petty crimes and theft and stuff like that.Maybe some violence here and there, but not really. It was more just like chasing down just punks, and we sort of see that early on in the season, one case of that.

But to see, week in and week out, these women and and young kids be dealt this kind of trauma, hits quite a nerve. It's unending. It makes him upset, and it grosses him out for sure. But I think also it sticks in his core. It's a very, very, very hard thing for him to get used to. So he enters in this world where these people have been doing this for years, and they seem like they have it for the most part under control, or at least they have found a way to do it, and he's still figuring out "How do you guys manage this, week in and week out? Because this is unlike anything I've ever seen." The fact that this kind of evil exists in the world is just really unsettling for him.

TVLINE | I've wanted to ask you this since you started at "SVU": You played a character with the same last name on the show before. Was there any conversation in the beginning about how Griff is not the same person?
Yeah. [Laughs] I played Ellis Griffin in Season 18, who was a perp. When I first got the [Griff] audition, I laughed cause I was like, "Oh man, I think I have a shot at this. I hope that they don't go back and look at my name from before. Or, I guess if they really want me, they can change the name" — but they didn't. And then through through the callback process, it never came up or anything, and I didn't want to bring it up cause I was like, "I don't want to create any sort of like reason to not cast me." [Laughs] And then I got cast, and then the announcement came out or whatever, and, I remember getting tagged in a bunch of different [online fan] theories, of like, "Oh, Corey's coming back to play his twin brother, in order to get him out of jail." [Laughs]

Anthony Edwards played my dad, and he was a cop who got me out of prison, which was based on a previous story about a swimmer at Stanford... I just had to laugh at that, 'cause there's there's no connection. It's just maybe a little ode. Honestly, I, I haven't asked our showrunner, Michele [Fazekas]. [Laughs] I haven't asked really anybody if they knew. I don't know. I'm kind of letting it just sit and see what happens.