Suits: Is Harvey Going Soft? Can Mike and Harvey Keep Their Secret Forever?

He's ruthless. He's cunning. He's fearless. But is one of New York City's top closers, Suits' Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), going soft? 

"For Harvey, there's that juggling act of 'Maybe I can be a little bit softer here and there. Maybe I can just ease up on some people,'" Macht tells TVGuide.com. "I find that there are these jabs here and there that Mike throws where Harvey, earlier on, would have been like, 'Get out of my face!' But slowly, we're starting to see that he's actually amused by it."

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After being forced to band together time after time to keep the truth about Mike (Patrick J. Adams) — and his lack of a law degree — a secret, the dynamic between the two men has evolved far beyond where it started, and has changed them both -- for better and for worse. "For me, it started as a typical mentorship like this is a guy Mike wants to be, and therefore he is going to do everything that Harvey tells him," Adams says. "But what the writers have done so beautifully and allowed us to create is a situation that is a lot more complex and breaks that typical mentor mold. There are a lot of elements about Harvey that Mike respects and admires, but there's a lot of it that he doesn't want to end up like." (Macht adds with a laugh: "I don't want to be you either!")

So does this mean Harvey is going to crack completely? Not exactly, but Harvey's softer side will emerge when his protégé, Mike needs it most. "You're going to see that his armor breaks and that he is three-dimensional. He does have a heart," Macht says. "I think that he shows his heart by standing up for Mike all the time, but you'll see it more and more when it gets more personal as we're slowly peeling back that onion."

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Harvey will have to continue to come to Mike's defense as it becomes more complicated for the pair to hide his lack qualifications from their competition inside and outside of the firm. "There's always the risk and we are definitely playing with that right until the very end," he says. "I love seeing how the writers come up with new ways for me to play that fear and then try and find solutions. ... For me, that's always fun to play whenever I suddenly really have to worry."

Unfortunately, their efforts to keep Mike's real past hidden may be in vain. After many misfires and almost reveals, the stars of the USA drama say it's starting to seem like not a question of if everyone will discover the truth, but when."Its building towards a place where we're running out of ways to keep it a secret," Adams says. "I think Mike is slowly realizing that he can't keep this up forever and, eventually, someone's going to find out. And what are we going to do then?"

Suits airs Thursdays at 10/9c on USA.