Detective Cat Sullivan is a second-generation Irish-American detective with the 125th Precinct. She has achieved some level of notoriety after capturing the "Prospect Park Stalker".
Growing up, Cat was best friends with Annabella Capella, the granddaughter of the head of the Capella crime family. Annabella has since taken over the family business.
Cat’s late father was a dirty cop on the Capella family's payroll. To avoid an Internal Affairs investigation Cat’s father murdered Annabella's grandfather; he was in turn killed as revenge for his actions.
Cat was portrayed by Chyler Leigh who is also known for portraying Lexie Grey on Grey's Anatomy and Alex Danvers on Supergirl.
Physical Appearance
Cat is a beautiful young woman in her mid 20s with reddish brown short hair and hazel eyes. She has an athletic build and is 170 cm tall and weighs just shy of 60 kg.
Her clothing style is simple, consisting mainly of jeans, flannel shirts, boots and leather or denim jackets.
Personality
Skills and Abilities
Detective Sullivan is strong and skilled enough in hand-to-hand combat to beat multiple larger opponents and throw them around at will. Armed with a nightstick or a handgun (Glock 19) she’s even more dangerous.
She is not known for diplomacy and while her interaction skills are not the best she is rather good at intimidation and interrogation.
Cat is athletically minded and enjoys jogging and basketball; she’s highly skilled in both activities. In fact, she was starting point guard during her senior year on both her school's All-City and All-State teams.
Since her teens Cat has strived to be athletic and in top physical condition. This was due to her father, who had wanted a boy when Cat was born. Thought he loved her dearly, he treated her like a son. Throughout her life Cat thrived on his approval and one way to get that was to be athletic and tough. As a result Cat has exceptional stamina, and is far tougher and stronger than one would expect.
Cat Sullivan In Action
Cat Sullivan in Action
Sullivan is not a good driver, on the contrary, she is a horrible driver and several wrecked vehicles attest to this.
Trivia
- Chyler cut her hair short after Grey's Anatomy as a symbol of moving forward from the series and the character of Lexie Grey. "The short hair…you know, I cut my hair about a month after Grey’s sort of as my own symbolic moment of moving forward and just trying something that I’ve wanted to try forever and never really had the guts to do it. Now I had some free time to be able to explore and I did. Boy, I chopped a lot of hair off. I love it." Executive producer Gary Scott Thompson wanted Cat to have even shorter hair and chopped more of her hair. "It made sense to the character. I wanted her to be so far from Lexie as well because the characters, they’re different. I wanted her to actually feel typically different from Lexie and so she could just go because it’s very physical. She was doing a lot of running and shooting and driving and sending her all through the streets of New York. So it’s a very, very different character than Lexie.”
- The character was strong, tough and athletic, hence the actress playing Cat was expected to run, jump and throw people around with ease. Simply put the role was to be physically challenging. "Well, it is incredibly challenging in a lot of ways as far as physically challenging, it definitely pushed me further than I had been." Unfortunately it was only a few weeks between Chyler signing on to the project and when filming started leaving very little time to get into shape. Fortunately that wasn't required as Chyler was already in good physical shape. She increased her strength training however and also upped her cardio.
- In fact, it was not the physical, but the mental challenges that were harder for Chyler. "...it’s a very schizophrenic business. We just have to kind of jump from one person to the next, different personalities. And so for me it was just trying to get my mind in the game of playing something different but also tapping into areas of my own life that maybe I don’t exercise often, which is that aggression. I’m a very easy-going person that’s just sort of fun-loving and whatnot so I tried to bring those aspects into the character that was already rooted in a, I want to say, darker place."
- Unfortunately she broke her leg on the third day which had a great effect on what the character could do; the broken leg was eventually written into the story. "I broke my foot on Day 3. It was during a chase sequence — I had been wearing motorcycle boots for 10 hours of marathon sprinting! I have a pretty high threshold for pain, but two weeks later, I couldn't stand on my foot anymore. They ended up writing the injury into the show."
Gallery
Images
