Scandal's Joe Morton: Rowan Isn't "Un-Killable" --- But Will Olivia Take the Kill Shot?

There are three certainties in life: Death, taxes and Papa Pope having the last laugh.
"He always finds a way!" Joe Morton tells TVGuide.com of his Scandal super-villain. "One of the joys of playing the character is people love to hate him. People say to me all the time on Twitter, 'Love the way you play the role. Don't like the character,' which is perfect. You want his demise, but at the same time, it's wonderful the way he manages to evade all this stuff. How is he going to get out of this again?"
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Indeed, Rowan might as well be on Survivor. There's almost no one he hasn't outwitted, outplayed and outlasted during his reign of terror in and out of the B613 Command post. "Against me, you will lose," he warned Olivia (Kerry Washington) two weeks ago. So far, she has, after her amateur hour game plan to take down pops — offering herself, the "shiny new object," as bait — with Fitz (Tony Goldwyn) and Jake (Scott Foley) backfired badly last week. Rowan, naturally, figured it out and went Full Terror Monologue on her."You think the world is so terrible with me in it, wait 'til you see what it's like without me," he growled. "I think what he's referring to is she lives behind an invisible wall of protection she's not aware of," Morton says. "If I remove myself, we'll see how you survive on your own."
Olivia will get a taste of that Papa Pope-less place on Thursday's winter finale (9/8c, ABC), but Rowan's scathing threats won't deter her from her quest. She does want the kill shot after all. But will she actually go through with it? "Rowan might put himself in that kind of danger, but I think he would be shocked if she actually killed him," Morton teases. "I think it would be an insult to him that his own daughter would try to kill him. He is more heartbroken that he might want to know how and why she made this choice when all he's done was try to protect her."
Even if Liv does pull the trigger, that doesn't mean the bullet will find its way to Rowan. The master puppeteer has engineered last-minute escapes (see: convincing Tom [Brian Letscher] to pin the order to kill the president's son on Jake) as proficiently as he's designed long-term cons (see: killing the president's son). Because he's simply playing the game on a whole different level — admittedly an absurd one — than everyone else, Morton argues he shouldn't die. "Does he deserve to die? If you ask me, I would say no!" he says with a laugh. "But I understand why some people think he deserves to die. He needs to get his for everything he's done. I just enjoy his ability to be 10 steps ahead of everyone else. I enjoy that they're plotting to get rid of him and he figured it out. Part of me would love him to be the last man standing."
He adds: "I think he knows how to survive, but I don't know if he's un-killable. I don't think he is, even though it seems like he is. I think everybody has a weak spot and his is Olivia. But he's not going to make it easy."
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Morton believes Rowan truly does love Olivia, in his own perverse, warped way, but he's less certain of what his alter ego would do if he had to choose between his daughter and power. "The difficulty of being in power is you don't want to give up power. How do I maintain this power I have without destroying my daughter?" Morton says. "What would make him happy, I believe, is if she joined forces with him or ended things with Fitz. Fitz is pedantic and when things don't go his way, he starts drinking. ... Jake — he didn't plan to attack Jake with a knife until Jake opened his mouth. I think he would've been the guy [for Olivia]. 'Alright, Jake's not my favorite person, but as long as it's not Fitz, it's fine.' But now they're all working together. And he will play the game to the very end."
It's not just the game that Rowan plays so well, but how he plays the players. Time and time again, he manages to turn people into his pawns with his soaring speeches that are supportive yet ominous. That's because, according to Morton, what Rowan says is always rooted in the truth.
"His M.O. is emotional blackmail. That's how he gets to you," the Emmy winner says. "He's a three-dimensional chess player. He knows what people will attempt to do and ... puts up a move that makes you look in one direction to pull you away, but I'm going in a different direction so I can attack you in a third direction. He has put [B613] together with such precision, such detail and trained people to do what he wants them to do even if they don't wanna do it — these guys have a hard time looking at him like he's vulnerable and they can take him down. If you're a tennis player and the person on the other side of the net is [Novak] Djokovic or [Rafael] Nadal or [Roger] Federer, you're already intimidated. He's that. Intimidation is the best tactic."
Morton, of course, can't dish on Rowan's fate on Thursday's episode, but he teases that Rowan won't deploy Mama Pope (Khandi Alexander) to get back at Liv — "He doesn't trust her," he says — and also that what viewers are expecting might not be what they get.
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"There are a certain number of surprises," he says. "There's one moment that I know of that people are going to think is going one way, but it goes a different way altogether. It's a nail-biter. It's equally as exciting and nail-biting walking into the table read and not knowing if you'll make it to the end of the script! A couple of times, it looked like I wasn't, but I did. I would imagine on some level, that's exactly what Rowan goes through. He doesn't know moment-to-moment if he's going to make it. He makes these plans [and] hopes for the best."
Scandal airs Thursdays at 9/8c on ABC. Do you think Rowan will die?
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