Criminal Minds is only weeks away from wrapping its fifteenth and final season on CBS, meaning the end of Paget Brewster's time as Emily Prentiss (again). That doesn't mean the end of her time on CBS, though, as Brewster landed a live-action role on another of the Eye Network's dramas. Her new show will be the action adventure drama Blood & Treasure, which will take her overseas and has presented her with a new set of challenges that she is hilariously tackling.
First, who is Paget Brewster playing on Blood & Treasure? The beloved CBS regular (who also appeared on one of the network's comedies earlier in the 2019-2020 TV season) definitely isn't playing Prentiss 2.0, and it won't just be a one-off guest shot.
Paget Brewster will tackle the recurring role of a resourceful nun in Rome by the name of Sister Lisa. Deadline reports Sister Lisa is a friend of Father Chuck Donnelly's, and she becomes a source of information for him as he begins to investigate a mystery. Despite what sounds like a serious storyline, Sister Lisa is a nun with a sense of humor.
So, it's fitting that Paget Brewster seems to be keeping a sense of humor about her preparations for the Blood & Treasure role! The actress, whose role in Season 2 of the drama will be recurring, is heading to Italy to play Sister Lisa. Despite her many talents developed over her years on the small screen, one skill has eluded her: fluency in conversational Italian.
Paget Brewster is using the popular language service Duolingo to learn Italian, and it's not going too well so far. Brewster has shared some of her learning journey so far via Twitter. Take a look at her first Duolingo post:
Unless Sister Lisa makes her Blood & Treasure debut as a nun who operates a side business selling chocolate-covered bananas or Paget Brewster lands a side job in Italy hosting a cooking program, this particular phrase might not come in too handy! There is always money in a banana stand, though.
In this tweet, posted on January 26, she hadn't written the sentence in Italian. Was this because she just hadn't done it yet? Was she protesting the challenge because of its irrelevancy? Or was she just not ready to show her grasp of the Italian language to Twitter just yet?
The food-based challenges from Duolingo didn't stop with the chocolate bananas. A few days later, Paget Brewster shared another sentence that probably won't do her much good in Italy:
Paget Brewster evidently doesn't expect that she'll be overcome with curiosity about whether or not horses eat bread after she spends some time in Italy for Blood & Treasure. Personally, I would laugh if there's a scene in Season 2 in which Sister Lisa has to ask somebody who has come to her chocolate banana stand if horses eat bread, but I'm not holding my breath.
Apparently Duolingo has more than one Italian question involving horse diets, since Paget Brewster posted another tweet the very next day about directly asking a horse if it wants an apple. Does Duolingo have a program for learning horse? If Paget Brewster does ask a horse if it wants an apple, I doubt it could answer in Italian (or English).
In all seriousness, at least Paget Brewster has some time before she starts playing Sister Lisa for Blood & Treasure in April. That may not be enough time to become fluent in Italian, but maybe Duolingo will move her past the food- and horse-based questions by then!
Blood & Treasure will likely return in summer 2020. If you want to see how Blood & Treasure left off, you can find the full first season streaming on Amazon Prime. For now, you can catch Paget Brewster in the final stretch of Criminal MInds before the long-running series wraps for good on Wednesday, February 19 on CBS. For some more viewing options now and in the not-too-distant future, check out our 2020 winter and spring premiere schedule.
