A few weeks ago, an email landed in my Inbox that caused me to shriek. Loudly. It was an invitation to visit the set of Chuck the following week where a few reporters would have the opportunity to watch part of an episode being filmed and interview members of the cast. Not living in Los Angeles meant that accepting the invitation would require last minute plane tickets and shuffling of the work schedule, but lo and behold, it all worked out. It was a fast trip – I left work at noon on Monday and was back in my office by 1PM on Wednesday, after nearly missing my connection in Houston because I’d fallen asleep. But you know what? Totally worth it.

I arrived at the location for the day’s filming at about 10AM on a Tuesday. The action was centered in a former bank in downtown Los Angeles that was standing in for…a bank. Ah, show biz trickery. If you followed me on Twitter that day, you know when Yvonne Strahovski, Timothy Dalton and Linda Hamilton showed up, followed by Zachary Levi. You also know that I was almost an extra in the episode.

See, when I arrived, I didn’t see any other blogger-types, so I asked some people who were standing around for direction. They sent me to talk to “that guy in the hat”, who told me to hang on a minute because he wasn’t ready for me yet. OK, no problem, they must be sending us over in groups, I thought. Gee, I hope I’m not the last one to arrive and therefore the only person in my group. Awkward! Even more awkward? When said guy comes over to where I’m standing with two much older gentlemen and starts giving us instructions on where to stand and what to do. That’s when it hit me: he thinks I’m background! I quickly spoke up and said, “Noooo, no, no! I’m just here to observe!” I’m still debating whether or not that was the right move. See, if I’d gone with the flow, I’d be in an episode of Chuck, but I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to watch the scenes that didn’t require extras or interview the cast. So…I think sticking with the blogger thing was the right choice. After all, I got to chat with Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski, Linda Hamilton and Ana Gasteyer instead. Worth giving up those 15 seconds of fame? Let’s find out.

You can hear Zac’s interview, along with my jetlagged recounting of the visit, in Chuck vs. the Podcast 68. Because of Gray’s wrist injury, our podcast schedule had to be adjusted, so the remaining interviews are coming to you in print form.

Warning: spoilers ahead!

Linda Hamilton

Linda is delightful to watch both during and between scenes. She was clearly enjoying her time on the set, and already knew a lot of the crew by name. She noticed me and Zap 2 It’s Rick Porter on the second level of the bank, watching from the balcony, and waved and smiled throughout the day. At one point she even jokingly yelled up to me to call for help (I’ll let you peruse the photos to figure out why). She’s tiny, radiates both energy and calm (no mean feat), and made a point to learn each reporter’s name and look everyone in the eye when talking to them. Yes, I was smitten.

Asked if she was having as much fun as it looked from above, she chuckled, “I always have fun. I don’t know if you’ve heard that about me. It’s a discipline. I love doing this show. I totally love doing this show!” Asked how many episodes she was signed on for, at that point the answer was “4-7” (this is before the 11-episode order) but she hoped to go straight through to the season finale “and then get picked up for 10 more seasons.”

We couldn’t hear the dialog from our vantage point, so we asked her what was happening in the scene. “Many different things. I’m in handcuffs because they think I’m a mole, or no longer with the CIA. They think I’m the bad girl, but we are trying to get information to prove that I’m not the bad girl. Then the Russians come.” Asked who “we” referred to, Linda revealed that Timothy Dalton’s character, Gregory Tuttle, is her MI-6 handler and, based on the way they interact in the scene we saw, they definitely have a shared history.

“It’s a little vague,” Linda said of her character’s motives. The writers didn’t tell her much about Mary Bartowski in the beginning, so she tried to play the character as though whatever was in the script were completely true at that moment. Her relationship with Chuck is less murky, at least in the beginning: “She’s pretty much cold, play by the rules and forget all the other stuff that’s been missing for 20 years. So the big intense dialog that you think might happen absolutely does not happen.”

When asked about her relationship with Ellie, however, Linda said “[It’s] a whole different animal.” She was looking forward to filming a mother-daughter scene later that week, “to have the feelings that are underlying come forth, as opposed to just stuffing it all down and being professional.” Sound familiar?

Ana Gasteyer

It was a bit of a shock to see Ana Gasteyer on the set. From my vantage point, she was blocked from view during several takes, and I actually gasped aloud when she walked around a corner to set up another part of the scene. The Saturday Night Live alum plays Dasha, a Volkoff operative who has tracked Team Bartowski to the bank. Although the part is mostly serious, this is Chuck and this is Ana Gasteyer, so humor certainly comes into play. If you saw the sneak peeks for this episode, you got a glimpse of how she’s playing a baddie.

You also saw some rather obvious scars, one on her face and one on her nose. I couldn’t help asking about them, since no one else was going to do it. Would we find out anything about how she got them, or were they purely to make her look menacing?

“Theoretically I’ve been through a lot. My personal character journal would reflect that there was an incident with a shovel,” she deadpanned. “But it’s mostly to be left to your imagination.” She was sporting a “bruise” from an earlier scene that may or may not have been made by someone’s boot. Ana also revealed that she is “after Chuck. I want him dead.” We posited that unless they were going to change the name of the show, she was doomed to failure.

Ana is a big True Blood fan, so she’s crossing her fingers that this “terrifying” turn on Chuck will bring her to Alan Ball’s attention. We had fun talking True Blood with her – “I feel like their blood purchase levels quadrupled this season,” she mused – and then through some surreal set of circumstances, I found myself standing next to Ana on the balcony overlooking a scene between Zachary Levi and Timothy Dalton while we improvised dialog.

Yvonne Strahovski

By the time Yvonne was free to chat, it was just me and Christi from BuddyTV left on set. Yvonne had been on set for several hours by then, rehearsing and filming some action scenes and rehearsing for a fight that would be filmed later that evening, so she was pretty tired but still cheerful. We tried to pry some information out of her about the fight, but all we got was that it involved trust issues, specifically that Chuck trusts Mama B’s motives and Sarah does not. (We saw proof of that at the end of last week’s episode.)

“She’s trying to prove her innocence, and I’m not really having it. It’s a fine line,” she said of Mary Bartowski. “I think she’s very skeptical right now as to what her motives are. And I think she’s even more protective of Chuck because she just doesn’t know what Mama Bartowski’s motives are.”

Yvonne said that she’s enjoying having another woman to play opposite, “it can be a bit of a boys’ club,” she chuckled. Speaking of the boys, how does Casey feel about Mama Bartowski? “He’s even more skeptical than Sarah. Sarah always has to be the fine line between Chuck and Casey. I think he’s also taking the skeptical side because he knows I’m emotionally involved with Chuck so I will sway a little bit to cater to his emotional needs.”

I was on set the day after the season 4 premiere, so I was able to pass along how excited the fans were about the return of Chuck. She hadn’t had time to go online and check out the chatter, so she was pleased to hear it firsthand.

We didn’t have the chance to interview Timothy Dalton who was in demand all day (I think it may have been his first day on set), but all of the cast talked about how excited they were to have him on set and it was one of the highlights of my year to watch him work. At the time, I was bemused by how “cuddly” he looked in his big sweater and somewhat rumpled appearance. Now of course we’ve heard that he’s less “James Bond” and more “Stephen Bartowski” (don’t read too much into that, though; I’ve been told that any family vibes are purely coincidental), so this makes more sense.

Because I had a midnight flight out of Los Angeles, I didn’t stay until the end of filming but as I was leaving they were in the middle of rehearsing a big fight scene and handing out ear plugs for when they fired guns. Some of the twists of the episode as a whole were also revealed, and I cannot wait to see them play out on screen. At the risk of overhyping, I think I’ll go ahead and use the word “gamechanger” here.

How will Timothy Dalton, Ana Gasteyer, and Linda Hamilton impact Chuck? Watch “Chuck vs. the First Fight” tonight at 8/7c on NBC to find out and join us during our live chat to talk about it.