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How Ryan Eggold and Reid Scott Knew Each Other Before Playing Brothers on Law & Order
Ryan Eggold and Reid Scott were friends long before they played brothers on Season 24 of Law & Order. Find out how they met.
For the first time, Law & Order fans will get a glimpse at the complicated relationship between Det. Vincent Riley and his brother.
But thankfully, it wasn’t hard for Reid Scott, who plays the investigator, and Ryan Eggold — who takes on the role of his sibling Matt in Season 24's "Big Brother" episode — to slip into a comfortable dynamic onscreen. The two actors have had a close real-life bond for years.
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“You get to meet my brother, played by Ryan Eggold, who’s an old, dear friend of mine,” Scott told NBC Insider of the upcoming episode. “So it’s really fun to be reunited with him and he gives a fantastic performance. And his character and mine could not be more different.”
Though there's some friction between their onscreen counterparts on Law & Order, the two have no trouble getting along in the real world. Read on to find out more about how they first met and what other project they've worked on together.
How do Ryan Eggold and Reid Scott know each other?
Scott and Eggold’s real-life friendship goes back to the early days of their careers.
The two friends became “poker buddies” after Scott moved to Los Angeles from upstate New York to begin his acting career in what Scott jokingly told NBC Insider now seems like “a thousand years ago.”
“I just happened to fall in with a crowd of USC (University of Southern California) alum and fellow actors that I had met through auditions and things like that and we just all kind of became poker buddies, really, and Ryan was part of that crowd,” Scott shared.
They would cross paths again “years later” after Scott met his now-wife, writer and actress Elspeth Keller, who, like Eggold, had attended USC.
“She had known Ryan,” Scott said. “They did some scenes together in scene study class at USC as well, so the connections kept going and that just sort of helped deepen the friendship."
But it was their luck at both getting cast in the 2013 movie Beside Still Waters that may have sealed their fate as lifelong friends.
“It was an indie movie written and directed by our good friend Chris Lowell, who is also a phenomenal actor, and so we were sequestered in this cabin in the woods in Upper Peninsula, Michigan for a summer and we just had the best time,” Scott told NBC Insider of working on the comedy-drama.
Although Eggold and Scott played characters that were “sort of pitted against each other" in Beside Still Waters, when the cameras stopped rolling, the two actors had “so much fun off camera” together, according to Scott.
“The whole cast did, but Ryan and I especially, we really connected and had a blast,” Scott recalled. “We’ve stayed in touch ever since.”
Both have come a long way since their early days as struggling actors. Aside from his ongoing stint on Law & Order, Scott is well-known for his roles in Veep and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, while Eggold made a name for himself in NBC’s crime drama The Blacklist, as well as the network's medical drama New Amsterdam.
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The friends discovered they would have another opportunity to share the screen together in Season 24 of Law & Order.
“When I heard that they were going to bring Ryan in to play my brother, I was like, ‘Oh man, this is going to be a blast,’” Scott recalled.
They relied on their close real-life bond to delve deeper into their characters.
“It helped us just find the shorthand between these two brothers,” Scott said, adding that it only took a few minutes for them to determine how they wanted to play the characters.
All about Ryan Eggold's Matt Riley on Law & Order
While Scott may have nothing but good things to say about Eggold, the relationship between Vincent and Matt Riley on Law & Order is more complicated.
According to the episode's synopsis, the detective’s personal and professional life collides when his brother Matt “is connected to a murder investigation.”
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Matt is described in a trailer for “Big Brother” as the “last person seen with the victim” — and it appears he may know more about the murder than he’s willing to share.
“I’m not ratting out a friend of mine,” he angrily told Det. Riley and his partner, Det. Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), in the promo. “I’m not a snitch."
To find out more about how the emotional case will play out, watch Law & Order on Thursday, October 17 at 8/7c p.m. on NBC or stream it the next day on Peacock.
— Additional reporting by Stephanie Gomulka
