In a recent interview, Thomas Gibson, who plays Hotch on Criminal Minds, dished about directing the latest episode, titled Lockdown, of the CBS series.

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Gibson spoke to Zap2it about filming for the episode and how the location actually had a Manson connect.

"I think the performances are all really great, and we made great use of our location," Gibson said. "That's the old women's prison here in Los Angeles ... where all the Manson women were incarcerated. Those walls can definitely talk. It's owned by the L.A. County Sheriff's [Department] and they use it for storage or any film or television company that needs a local prison of a certain vintage. It was a perfect vintage for us, and it lent a real kind of creepy, dingy quality to our story, which was beneficial for sure."

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The actor has directed an episode of this season before but he didn't appear on the screen as much in that one, this time around he did double duty and had a substantial role to play on-screen as well as off. Gibson also spoke about how he managed to pull that off with this episode.

"I took a little more of a break than I did in the last one that Virgil [Williams] wrote and I directed," Gibson said. "I was grateful for a little bit more breathing room, but the fact that we are all locked in to this prison until we figure it out means that I couldn't disappear for any length of time. I utilized my stand-in Cal so that I could see the shots for rehearsal before stepping in to actually shoot it, which was really beneficial as well,"

He went to on to reveal that this was his most ambitious episode so far.

"The ratio of enjoyment to stress was better on the enjoyment end this time," Gibson says. "This is probably the biggest episode that I've tackled so far."

Lockdown aired on March 4 on CBS.

Watch the preview here:

Tags: Criminal Minds CBS television