The Windy City is getting a new cop.
The Windy City is getting another officer. Chicago P.D.’s Intelligence Unit will be joined by a new detective during Season 11, and we’ve got the scoop. Here’s everything we know about the new addition:
Who is Det. Josephine “Jo” Petrovic?
Det. Petrovic is introduced in Season 11, Episode 7’s “The Living Dead” when the Intelligence Unit discovers their abduction investigation is actually a serial killer case. Enter Petrovic, whom Voight recruits to help them understand the methodology of the perpetrator.
“Petrovic is extremely smart, but she has her own kind of secrets and demons that she’s dealing with,” Jason Beghe (Voight) told TV Insider. “And socially, she’s somewhere a little further along on the spectrum than most, but she has a strong sense of herself and she’s a very astute and useful a member of the team at this point to help us solve the problems, figuring out who this serial killer is. She’s a gifted profiler.”
What episodes will Petrovic appear in?
Following her first appearance in “The Living Dead,” we’ll see even more of Petrovic in Season 11, Episode 8’s “On Paper” which will be an Upton (Tracy Spiridakos) focused episode.
NBC’s synopsis reads: “Upton brings SVU detective Petrovic back into the fold to help with the investigation of a tender-age kidnapping.”
Who is the actress that plays Jo Petrovic?
The new detective is played by Bojana Novakovic, a Serbian-Australian actress you might have seen in Drag Me To Hell, Rake, Instinct, Westworld, Shameless, Birds of Prey, and I, Tonya
Jason Beghe, who plays Sgt. Hank Voight, praised Novakovic in a recent interview with NBC Insider.
“I am super enthusiastic and impressed with her. She is a very strong, smart, professional, cool actor/person as far as I can see,” he said. “I think that both she and Petrovic could be a wonderful kind of addition to Voight and Jason’s lives.”
Novakovic, who’s also an anti-mining activist, moved to Australia at the beginning of the Balkans war in the early 1990s. Watching the events of the conflict in her native Serbia on the news inspired her to find a career that would help people, according to the Financial Review. In fact, she wanted to be a doctor before she found acting.
“Then I saw Princess Diana was helping kids in war zones. So I was like, ‘I need to be a princess’. And then I saw a documentary about Grace Kelly – she was an actress and then she became a princess. And I was like, ‘oh, that’s how you become a princess,'” she told the publication.
But as Petrovic comes, Season 11 will also see the departure of Tracy Spiridakos, who plays Detective Hailey Upton. Showrunner Gwen Sigan spoke about wrapping the character’s arc up.
“We’re really going to dig into that this season, and dig into growth and transformation — how do you get through your life not looking like what you thought it was going to look like, and realizing that there could be more out there that is maybe better for you?” she said. “It will be a fun ride for her, and there are some interesting and new characters coming in for her to play against.”
Other shocking Chicago P.D. exits over the years have included Jesse Lee Soffer, Jon Seda, Archie Kao, Brian Geraghty and and Elias Koteas.
Reporting by McKenzie Jean-Philippe
