Nikita's Noah Bean on Ryan's Big Showdown with Amanda

[Warning: The following contains spoilers from Nikita's "Bubble" episode. Read at your own risk!]
Ryan's suspicions about The Shop proved correct, but it came at a price.
On Friday's Nikita, Ryan (Noah Bean) got too close to the truth and fell into the hands of Amanda (Melinda Clarke), whom Team Nikita had thought was dead. But before Amanda could work her evil mind-control ways on him and use him as a pawn, Ryan took himself out of the equation by launching himself out through an upper-story window onto a waiting vehicle below. The fall eventually killed him, but not before he was able to whisper vital information to Nikita (Maggie Q).
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"I'm actually kind of honored to be given the big death, you know?" Bean tells TVGuide.com. "When [creator Craig Silverstein] called me up, I just said, 'I'm cool with it. I trust you. Just make sure it's a cool death.' He definitely delivered. Nick Copus who directed this episode ... I felt like I could trust him about wanting the death to be gritty and raw and desperate. Ryan's not Michael (Shane West) or Owen (Devon Sawa). He's not a trained assassin. He's kind of a bookish desk man. He can hold his own, but he's not a Navy SEAL.
"The fun thing about Nikita is that I also died before," he continues. "In Season 2, to break me out of prison, they essentially killed me and got me out of the federal prison and then brought me back to life basically. It's in the Division Handbook. How to get somebody out of a jam: just kill them, get them out of there and bring them back. I think they've killed Michael too."
Check out what else Bean has to say about TV deaths, his time on Nikita and what's next:
With Nikita, Once Upon a Time and Damages, you sure do have a lot of dramatic deaths! Do you have a favorite?
Noah Bean: I need to make a death reel or something. I guess I've just got one of those faces that you want to smash. [Laughs] I've done a lot of deaths. I actually had a great death when I did an episode of Fringeyears ago. I play this FBI guy and I pick up this $2 bill that had some kind of virus on it and it caused the skin to grow over all of the orifices of my body. And so I end up suffocating inside my own face. That was probably the most intense. And I think I've jumped off of balconies, I've frozen to death once, and obviously I spent a lot of time getting bludgeoned to death on Damages.
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Back to your Nikita death. Do you think it was necessary for Ryan to die?
Bean: For our story, yeah. I think that was the only way to get the truth out. He knew that if Amanda got her hands back on him that she would do her little brain-eel thing and it would have been over. She would have won. It was the only way to expose the fact that she was still there. He didn't have to think too long about it. He really believed in the cause and everybody else had a girl. Ryan was going solo, so I think yeah, it was time to sacrifice it all.
Were those last scenes in the hospital emotional since this was goodbye for you?
Bean: Yeah, when Nikita comes to put the medal on me, that was me, holding my breath. And also just the situation -- I was in traction and I ended up just staying on there -- I think when they shot the scene where they're trying to resuscitate me and my last words trying to tell Nikita it wasn't over ... that was all the same night that we shot that. I remember it was very, very late at night, and I stayed on the gurney the whole time. Maggie did a very wonderful job of getting there and saying goodbye. "Bubble" was a lot of fun to make and it was more joyful than sad because I was just proud of the work and proud of the journey and it was nice to go out in style.
Looking back over these past seasons, did you have a favorite episode, scene or set?
Bean: There was a lot of amazing moments. One thing I enjoyed in Season 2 [was] when I was put into Percy's fishbowl, that glass cell that he was in in the bowels of Division. That was the first time I got to work with Xander [Berkeley]. Xander is a really fun guy to work with, very creative. Also, that set piece was so dramatic [that] you really felt the claustrophobia. And being in there with Percy was like being thrown in the lion's cage.
Also, I think the first scene I ever shot, which was Season 1, Episode 10. It was an episode called "Dark Matter," directed by Danny Cannon, and that whole episode was just a blast. I had never done action before. I'd never really been around guns and so that was a totally new experience. I found I had to do very little acting because it was absolutely terrifying. Even though these were just squibs and fake shots, it was loud and intense. You feel it when these guns start going off.
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In doing Nikita these past few years, what have you added to your skill set? Was it mainly guns and that sort of action stuff?
Bean: Yeah there was definitely more physicality to the work, even though Ryan didn't deal too much with that. And I spent a decent amount of time talking to computer screens. All that time in Division, me and Aaron [Stanford], who played Birkhoff, we spent a lot of time where we were pretending to be talking to Michael or Nikita or Alex (Lyndsy Fonseca) or whoever's out on the mission. We're sitting in Ops and basically it's the [assistant director] saying their lines in a monotone voice. That had its challenges. It also had its rewards because that meant we could be inside during those long, cold Toronto winters.
What will you miss the most?
Bean: I think the people. We had a really good group. Not just the cast, but also our writers and producers and a lot of our directors who were repeats and kept coming back up. It was a really great group. We all built lives in Toronto and are still hanging out and still together. People are getting together to watch the episodes. The city of Toronto was a very welcoming place to us and a good place to be. Because it's hard, sort of a gypsy life being an actor, you go off to these cities or towns for quite a long period of time. There were some great restaurants, a place called Local Kitchen that was fantastic. I had a favorite coffee shop called Te Aro and some great bars.
Do you have a message for your Nikita fans?
Bean: I think we were all very happy that we got to tell the end of the story. The fans were so wonderful. That was kind of my first experience of having such a strong, vocal fan group behind the show. I just thank the fans for being supportive of me, of Ryan joining Team Nikita and being part of the gang for as long as he did. Ryan was great, and I really respect Ryan. I feel honored to have played the guy for as long as I did.
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Where can we see you next?
Bean: I'm doing a little work. Right now I'm recurring on a show called Gang Related on Fox. It's a midseason show, and so I pop up in a few episodes of that. It's just been fun and a good group of people: Terry O'Quinn and Jay Hernandez.
Right now I'm actually talking to you from Detroit. I'm shooting a pilot here called 12 Monkeys with another Nikita alum, Aaron Standford. We're about midway through shooting the pilot, which is created by more Nikita alumni -- Travis Fickett and Terry Matalas, who were our writing team. They were two of our writers for Seasons 3 and 4. And Amanda Schull is our female lead in the pilot, and she did one episode of Nikita. Actually, there's a lot of Nikita people working together. Lyndsy Fonseca is shooting an indie film with Xander Berkeley right now. And then Shane West just finished shooting a pilot called Salem with Xander. So we all seem to be continuing to work together. There's something in the water up there.
Will you miss Ryan? What do you think will happen in the big Nikita finale?
Nikita airs Friday at 9/8c on The CW.
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