HitFix’s Alan Sepinwall sat down with Kurt Sutter. Here is a preview of the interview.

It’s been awhile since we’ve seen the whole group in action and it’s weird how with each passing year all of you begin to adopt more and more sort of SAMCRO character traits. (On “The Shield”), did you ever get the sense the Chiklis was starting to think he was a little too Vic Mackey?

Well it was very interesting. The strike team, they just ultimately bonded over the years, and I always talk about when it just got weird when Kenny (Johnson) wasn’t around anymore. They didn’t quite know what to do anymore. I think it’s hard being creative people and to not have that stuff sort of influence you. And it does. It trickles down. You spend so much time with these people that they do become in a lot of ways a surrogate family. And it’s happened with our guys, you know? And they do. They give each other shit and they are truly like a club. The interesting thing is Charlie is a street kid from Newcastle, and he’s like the closest thing we have on-set to being a real outlaw. Him and Tommy. Tommy grew up in Glasgow in the fucking ghettos. Those (scars) on his face? That’s all real shit. So, those two guys understand this life, you know what I mean? So for them, I don’t think it’s the show leading into their lives as much as their lives leading into the show.

Now, the jackpot that Gemma gets into at the end of last season, some of it is Stahl framing her, but she does murder someone right in front of Stahl. When you wrote that scene, did you already have in your head like this is how we will ultimately get out of it?

I knew that we would have to. I really had no idea what we were going to do, though. I wrote myself into a bit of a corner, but because of who Stahl is and because of the extreme nature of that relationship and her obsessive need to succeed which she’s really shown us, that will ultimately be something that we use to help unravel that. And we’ll find out early on that they found a gun with Polly, so that could potentially be self-defense, but that the other one was clearly murder, you know? So we started setting up potentially what some of the moves might be but it’ll ultimately be about Stahl that helps us sort of get Gemma out of that box.

See the full interview here.