`FBI: Most Wanted' star has fond memories of growing up on dairy farm
Nina Chase, the newest member of “FBI: Most Wanted,” relishes undercover work, boldly challenges her bosses, drives like a Burt Reynolds bootlegger and still finds time to raise an infant. But Shantel VanSanten, who plays Chase, is used to daunting tasks.
She grew up milking cows in Minnesota.
As the child of divorced parents, VanSanten split her childhood between Houston and Luverne, Minnesota, a picturesque town of 5,000 people near the South Dakota border, best known for its annual Hot Dog Nite and for being featured in Ken Burns' 2007 docuseries, “The War.”
Most of her exposure to the arts came in Texas, but she developed her strong work ethic while spending summers and holidays on her dad's dairy farm, where her shift often started at 5 a.m.
“You're doing real chores, not like vacuuming the floor, but carrying 5-gallon pails of grain or bringing the cows in from pasture, which can take an hour and a half,” VanSanten said earlier this month in a Zoom interview from her home in New York. “I probably romanticize it more now than I did as a kid. If I could choose a place where I feel at home, it would be sitting on top of the grain bin of my grandparents' farm or lying in the middle of a cornfield. That's where my soul is.”
VanSanten's latest character seems more at home battling drug dealers than boll weevils. She'll be familiar to regular viewers of TV procedurals. Chase popped up on several episodes of “FBI” during the past two seasons, squeezing in a romantic relationship with colleague Stuart Scola (John Boyd) between shootouts. She's now a regular cast member on the spinoff “FBI: Most Wanted,” which airs at 10 p.m. ET Tuesdays on CBS. It finished 14th in the Nielsen ratings, averaging more than 8 million viewers per episode.
“It was very weird, like being the kid who doesn't know what table she'll sit at in a new school,” said VanSanten, who made her mark in the fifth season premiere on Feb. 13 by rattling her new supervisor, Remy Scott (Dylan McDermott) and stopping an explosion by pouring bullets into a computer. “But everyone has been so wonderful and welcoming. I feel really grateful.”
It's an action-packed series, maybe more so than the other dramas produced by Dick Wolf, the TV Hall of Famer behind “Law Order.”