TV SERIES · 2011– · USA
Person of Interest
24 archived facts 3 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
24 Interesting Facts About Person of Interest
Interesting Facts (21)
- #001
Harold Finch's (Michael Emerson) fiancée, Grace Hendricks, is played by Carrie Preston, Emerson's wife in real life. Grace is a recurring character in seasons 1 to 3 and in season 5.
- #002
Seen from The Machine's side, security camera footage shows color-coded boxes around the people it's watching: white is the default and most common; white with red corners marks perpetrators (irrelevant numbers); yellow marks people who know about The Machine; red marks threats to it; blue marks Primary Operations assets (relevant numbers); and a black box with yellow corners marks the Analog Interface.
- #003
Sameen Shaw was brought in as a possible series regular, and she only became one because viewers took to her and the producers were happy with Sarah Shahi's performance.
- #004
Showrunner Jonathan Nolan said the main reason the writers made Root a major character was the theme Ramin Djawadi wrote for her: "Ramin wrote this theme for Root and it was amazing. She's a really fun, mysterious character, but we really wanted to hear that theme again! So when we came back to the [Season 1] finale, we knew where we wanted to go with the character."
- #005
Reese putting on glasses in season 2 so people won't recognize him is an inside joke: Jim Caviezel had been in the running in 2006 to play Superman in Superman Returns (2006).
- #006
Carl Elias has a lot in common with Sherlock Holmes's archenemy Professor Moriarty: both pose as mild-mannered schoolteachers while secretly running a criminal empire from the shadows, both are forever clashing with a crime-solving duo (Holmes and Watson, Finch and Reese), and both have a right-hand man named Moran.
- #007
Many characters share their actors' backgrounds. John Reese is from Washington state, like Jim Caviezel; Harold Finch is from Iowa, like Michael Emerson; in Allegiance (2014), Sameen Shaw says her mother is Iranian, making her half-Iranian like Sarah Shahi, and she speaks fluent Farsi; and Root is from Texas, like Amy Acker. In QSO (2016), Root goes undercover as a ballerina; we don't see her dance, but one onlooker is clearly impressed. Acker trained in dance for over a decade before she started acting.
- #008
Jonathan Nolan has known composer Ramin Djawadi since Batman Begins (2005), directed by his brother Christopher Nolan, on which Ramin wrote additional music for Hans Zimmer. Nolan calls him "unbelievably talented" and says that sometimes when they pick a song for the show, Ramin comes back with an original piece of his own, and Jonah has to admit, "Sorry, Ramin's s**t wins again!" Nolan later brought Djawadi in to score his HBO series Westworld (2016) and the Amazon Prime show Fallout.
- #009
Detective Joss Carter was brought into the team midway through season 1 at an executive's suggestion; the original plan was for her to stop hunting Reese and Finch only in the season finale, and the creators admit the change worked better.
- #010
Finch mostly uses easily spotted bird aliases with the first name Harold (Harold Wren, Crane, Crow, Quail, Gull, Swift, Starling and Mr. Partridge), though he has also gone by non-bird names like Arthur Bellenger, Thomas Paine, Dr. Tillman, Lucas Bennett and Walt Trowbridge. Norman Burdett arguably counts as a bird name (bird-ett). During John's interrogation in season 2, Finch's alias is "Howard French," not a bird, though choosing aliases that sound close to one another can come in very handy when you need them. In season 3, episode 21, "Beta," the cemetery his fiancée visits has a nameplate reading Harold Martin, which doesn't look like a bird name at first but is one: there are many species of martin around the world, including the Purple Martin, very common in North America, and the Gray-breasted Martin of Central and South America.
- #011
At least two Belgian Malinois play Bear: one has a white patch on its chest and the other doesn't, because the first dog bit Jim Caviezel when he kept tugging on its leash.
- #012
"Caroline Turing" takes her surname from Alan Turing, a founding figure of modern computing.
- #013
John Reese has his own theme that plays whenever he heads out on a mission.
- #014
Kevin Chapman was also an amateur boxer, so his Detective Lionel Fusco gets to show off those skills now and then.
- #015
In interviews, the show's makers said they had to fight network executives to keep the Machine and artificial intelligence in the show, a battle the executives luckily lost.
- #016
By seasons 3 and 4, the writers had noticed how much chemistry and fun Sarah Shahi and Amy Acker had on screen, so they built up the Shaw/Root romance, writing more scenes for the two of them and playing up the sexual tension.
- #017
John Reese carries a 9 mm Sig Sauer P226, which suits his military past, since it's one of the pistols favored by US Special Forces.
- #018
Sadly, the show's promotion never matched its ratings: it was one of the most-watched programs in the country, never mind on CBS, yet it was rarely advertised outside its own night and was often left out of the network's group promos.
- #019
Press releases first claimed the creators had killed off Carl Elias and, with the fifth season cut short, dropped their plans for him. In the season's fifth episode, he turns out to be alive and about as well as can be expected after a Samaritan sniper attack.
- #020
The show became notoriously hard to find, especially after its Blu-ray release: the first two seasons sell for reasonable prices, but from season 3 on, second-hand prices for the full set climb into the high double and triple digits, and availability varies from region to region as the rights have passed through several hands, making things even worse.
- #021
In Mission Creep (2011), as the camera pans across the police evidence locker, you briefly see a large Virgin Mary statue like the small heroin-filled ones from Lost (2004), on which J. J. Abrams was an executive producer.
Characters & Cast (1)
- #022
John Reese's undercover name is a nod to Batman's Riddler, whose name E. Nigma sounds like "enigma": "Mr. Reese" sounds like "mysteries." TV had played this trick long before: in the 1960s British series The Avengers (1961), Diana Rigg's heroine was named Emma Peel so it would sound like "M (or Man) Appeal."
Easter Eggs & References (2)
- #023
Between the show's second and third seasons, Edward Snowden revealed details of PRISM, a government program for surveilling US citizens to detect terrorist threats, which closely resembled the show's fictional Machine and how it works. The show later nodded to this in Lethe (2013), where PRISM appears at the end of the episode as a decoy set up by The Machine.
- #024
All of Reese's aliases use the first name John (John Reese, John Rooney, John Warren, John Anderson, John Wiley, John Campbell, John Randall and John Hayes), except his first one in the pilot (James J. Manzione) and the one in Mission Creep (Tony Miller). He also goes by "Detective Stills" and "Marshal Jennings," and the badge he "borrowed" somehow becomes permanent. Still, he generally uses these only when he needs to get into a place or at information that would otherwise be much harder, if not impossible, to reach.
Sources & editorial notes
Reference databases
- IMDb
Information from external sources is independently selected, consolidated and edited by Arka Evren. Sources are listed for verification and further reading. Encyclopedia text is used under its licence (CC BY-SA). How we work