Every week, ABC’s Scandal provides the audience with twists and turns and there was no bigger shock this season than when President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn) was shot.

Just seconds before Fitz went down, first lady Mellie Grant (Bellamy Young) pleaded with him to skip his birthday party, saying that she really didn’t want them to go. However, her persistence before the assassination attempt led us to believe that she might know more about the incident than she’s let on.

“More will definitely be revealed about everything that Mellie knows and everything that was going through her mind at that moment,” Young told Celebuzz about the midseason finale. Young also hinted that the writers of Scandal may be “drawing on historical precedent” for the incident referencing Ulysses S. Grant deciding not to attend the theater with Abraham Lincoln the night he was assassinated.

We talked to Young about last week’s big shooter reveal, Fitz’s recovery, and Mellie’s relationship with Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) as well as the alliance that got Fitz the presidency.

Note: Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen last week’s episode.

Celebuzz: Our jaws dropped when it was revealed that Huck (Guillermo Diaz) shot the President! What can we expect from the midseason finale and will this information come out to the characters?
Bellamy Young: You’ll definitely find out more of the circumstances of Huck being in that room and holding that rifle and how it all came together. Nobody takes a shot at the president alone. It is a sordid scandalous tapestry of players that sort of evolve towards someone making an assassination attempt. We’ll start to peel that story away over the next few episodes. This winter finale is shocking and it is heavy. You’ll be gripping – grab your wine, grab your sweetheart, whatever, watch it with someone and get ready because it’s a ride.

Celebuzz: Fitz doesn’t look like he is doing well. What’s the status of his recovery on the midseason finale?
BY: This week we are very much in the ICU just willing him to survive. It’s so disorienting, because we start this episode with Sally Langston [Kate Burton] as president and it’s so overwhelming. So we’ll have that fight ahead of us, but right now it’s just keeping him alive.

Celebuzz: What is Mellie’s role in the white house now that Sally has taken the presidency from Fitz?
BY: Right now, it’s just like I said, willing him to live. It takes all your force or you think you’re helping anyway to sit there and make sure someone survives something but believe me there is much antler locking between me and Sally Langston. I’m not taking lightly to her being in the Oval. Mellie will fix this as she intends to fix everything or at least in her mind.

Celebuzz: Let’s talk about the alliance that includes Mellie, Olivia, Cyrus (Jeff Perry), Hollis (Gregg Henry), and Verna (Debra Mooney), which got Fitz elected president. When are we going to see that come out?
BY: Over the course of the next few episodes, that will all come to a head because as we said in the beginning of this season: The dirty little secrets, they come out. That will unfold and sort of just go nuclear. It’s fantastic in its imploding glory. You’ll love it.

Celebuzz: Mellie and Fitz definitely have some type of love, however small, between them but when do you think it was that Mellie feels like she lost Fitz to Olivia?
BY:I don’t think she thinks she has by any measure or she wouldn’t be fighting so hard. She knows how many years they have together as a partnership. She knows the love that they had. She knows the family that they have. She’s fighting with every resource that she can field to get them back to that place. I think she really, really, really believes that that will happen. Either he will get over Olivia or he will sort of sublimate his personal life to his public life and sort of rejoin her at least on the public path. I think she’s not even asking for the love that she thought they had to resume. I think she’s literally just asking for the partnership. I don’t think she has at all given up on Fitz and Mellie. I don’t think she ever will.

I do think he has true love with Olivia. I don’t think that’s the kind of love he has for Mellie and she understands that. She sees how different he is with Olivia but I think she thinks life is complicated and she’s willing to make sacrifices from her idealized notion of them as the perfect couple around to be on this path with him, in this life. Her love for him is real and true and strong.

Celebuzz: With the man that you both love being down and out at the moment, could we maybe see Mellie and Olivia coming together?
BY: Absolutely. Especially when you’re sitting by someone’s deathbed. All you want in the world is what’s best for them. I’m more into the friendship Mellie and Olivia would have had and you’ll see some of that in future episodes too. It’s really sad because they’re so alike. I mean they are so different in so many ways but they’re so alike in so many others. I miss her. I take things out on her, besides the fact that she and my husband are sleeping together; there was the possibility of greatness of between the two of them.

Scandal’s midseason finale airs Thursday at 10 PM on ABC. Young told us “Everyone can join the conversation [about the episode] if they tweet at hashtag #whatthehuck.”

What do you think about Scandal’s latest reveal? Are you watching the addictive show? Weigh in with your theories below!

ABC’s Scandal is going back in time to show viewers how Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldywn) or Fitz, as fans and Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) like to call him, became president of the United States.

“In the flashback episode we get to find out how and why and different little bits of back story that make everything in the present so much more resonant,” Bellamy Young who plays first lady Mellie Grant on the show told Celebuzz at the 2012 TV Guide Hot List Party.

She gushed, “I love those episodes. I’m angry and jealous in the present, so it’s nice to get to be happy and in love in the past.”

Still thrilled over the recent news that the Shonda Rhimes-created Scandal was picked up for a full season, Young told us, “I’ve very, very happy to have more to do.”

So happy that she didn’t mind being hard at work on election night filming the flashback episode.

“I was in the Oval Office all day,” she explained. “He [Goldwyn] was with the Constitution. That episode was very much about how we got into the White House which was, you know, scandalous!”

When we inquired for more scoop on the juicy ABC show, Young simply teased, “I know we’ll see one giant flashback episode that is going to be tasty, tasty, tasty. We get to be as surprised as you are. Those writers are writers who could think of things I could never even imagine. They surprise us all.”

Scandal airs Thursdays at 10 PM on ABC.

Are you excited to see how Fitz became president? Sound off in the comments below!

The cast of ABC’s Scandal could not be more excited about the full season order the sophomore series received on Monday from the network.

“We’re thrilled. Beyond thrilled,” exclaimed Bellamy Young, who plays First Lady Mellie Grant on the ABC show. “It’s a love fest, so to make some more, I just can’t even …I can never see where they’re going now, so now I’m excited to see nine more.”

Young attended the premiere of co-star Kerry Washington’s new movie, The Details, with fellow Scandal star, Dan Bucatinksy, who plays James, the husband/ex-journalist of the show’s White House Chief of Staff Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry).

Though the show will be pre-empted for the Country Music Awards this week, Scandal will come roaring back with a brand new episode next week.

“You will see us take up where we did from the round table with the syndicate and you’ll get to know a little more about the back workings of how this presidency came to happen,” explained Young.

Both stars also teased more friction in the future for James and Cyrus.

“I find out some things about the last election that I probably shouldn’t know,” Bucatinsky said. “But as a journalist, I dig it up. I don’t want to give away too much.”

We already know that Cyrus isn’t the best person to mess with in this televised version of Washington D.C., so could he be hinting that his life may be in jeopardy?

“I’m saying as of right this moment, it’s not,” he reveals. “But I’m certainly poking the bear. Let me tell you, James pokes the bear. Why I can’t just stay at home with my husband and baby? I don’t know. I don’t have one, that’s why. If he’d just get me a baby, I wouldn’t be in this trouble.”

Given the political nature of the show, Young teased that there is a lot of resonance between the series and the current election.

Young, 42, told us, “I was just saying, we’re going to have to tweet a caveat saying that they wrote it and we filmed this months before we knew anything. Please don’t anyone put a target on our back. It’s uncanny, you’ll see.”

Watch the duo’s entire interview above.

Are you excited about Scandal’s full season order? Let us know in the comments below!

The second season premiere of Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal wasted no time diving into the mystery of who is Quinn Perkins (Katie Lowes), set up in the first season finale. But in answering some questions about this mysterious young woman that Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) took under her wing, it cracked the door on a much larger conspiracy of cover-up that raised new questions about the secrets Olivia herself was keeping.

Just how steadfastly, and again secretively, Olivia went about defending Quinn, though, also tested the loyalty of the rest of Olivia Pope & Associates. As new clients and cases come their way, they will be forced to continue to work together as effortlessly and unified as they have in the past — all the while a new cloud of distrust hangs over some of their heads.

What can you expect from Scandal’s second season?

1. A light will slowly be shone not only on Quinn’s past life, but also the motive for saving her from standing trial as a suspect in a building bombing years earlier. “After figuring out the ‘who’ in ‘Who is Quinn Perkins?’ in Episode 1, we start to get a little bit into her history and exactly who she was before you met her. And some other people in her life that might have played pivotal roles in her life before she came to Olivia Pope,” Lowes previewed when Celebuzz chatted with the cast on their Los Angeles set.

2. Olivia continues to try to fight her pull towards Fitz (Tony Goldwyn), out of respect for his wife and the growing “America’s Baby” — which, by the way, does have a real name! “What’s really striking about where Olivia is in [Episodes] 2 and 3 is she is really definitely trying to do the right thing. Both she and Fitz, with regard to the “fixing of it all;’ [that’s] what sustains her,” Washington explained.

“She gets her life force from helping other people, and with regard to her relationship with the President, she really is trying to do the right thing. And I think he is, too. I think one of the great things about the show is it makes you ask the question ‘What is the right thing? Is the right thing to stay true to the commitments—the matrimonial commitments you’ve made? Is the right thing to honor your heart?’”

3. But Mellie (Bellamy Young) will get her time with Fitz, too, though it may prove to be short-lived. “I was so happy to get to explore some of the happier times with Fitz in Episodes 2 and 3. It was really, really nice to get to be warm with him again because I love Tony so much, and we usually spend our time screaming at each other!” Young laughed.

“It’s such a heart break watching the man you love find true love in front of your eyes [with someone else]. So, it really does leave her capable of anything because you’re never crueler than to the people you love the most because they can hurt you the deepest, and you’re meeting Mellie at a really sad, hurt moment in her life.”

4. Huck’s (Guillermo Diaz) inner demons may have been triggered by torturing his old friend on Season 1, but he is on a path to recovery. Despite new temptations that arise on Episode 3, he is really trying to be a better person. “I feel like he’s starting to realize he needs to find a way to fix himself, a way to find a support group. So he starts going to AA because there’s no Torturers’ Anonymous! I think Huck is really looking within himself and thinking ‘I’ve got to change, because this could be really bad.’ He’s enjoying torturing and killing too much. I think he’s moving forward, but that dark side will always be there. It’s kind of like an alcoholic; you can kind of get a handle on it, but it will always be there,” Diaz shared.

4. Once just a mere thorn in Olivia’s side, David (Joshua Malina) is inching toward becoming an actual threat. “I think even from the end of the pilot — that moment in the courtroom — something has clearly shifted. Something has clearly shifted at the end of the episode between [Olivia and David] for real. I think that is relevant, for sure. The dynamic between them has changed,” Washington previewed.

5. New cases for Olivia Pope & Associates, on paper, look like simple sex scandals, missing students, and stolen government property. But as the team looks into them, they learn there is so much more going on that what appears on the surface. A pivotal situation on Episode 3 “could ruin everyone!” per Washington. “It sort of destroys the very fabric that we built our American society on. It would take away our freedom of privacy completely,” she teased.

6. The Amanda Tanner of it all may be on the back burner for now, but the cast wouldn’t rule out it coming back around soon enough. After all the audience knows Cyrus (Jeff Perry) was really behind a good portion of it, and why reveal that if it won’t have more importance down the line? Lowes considered: “When all of these conspiracies come out at the end of these episodes, which is where I think we’re headed, this huger conspiracy that Quinn has been linked into and all of these questions coming back… I wouldn’t be shocked if it wouldn’t all come back around.”

7. While early episodes are heavy on Quinn and even Huck’s backstories, Harrison’s is right around the corner. Though Columbus Short called Harrison “very observant” and “the watcher” of the group, alluding to the fact that he may know more of his colleague’s secrets than he lets on, just how far he’ll go for them will come to light soon. “The moral ambiguity with his character is about to be discovered. The reason he’s so loyal to Olivia—you will find out. You will find out a lot about who Harrison is and why he’s there.”

Darby Stanchfield added that “[Episode 6] catapults something new that [Harrison] has to carry on [his] shoulders. It’s a game-changer for him.”

Any guesses!?

Scandal airs on ABC on Thursday nights at 10 PM.

What Scandal secret has you on the edge of your seat, waiting to see revealed? Sound off in the comments below!

– Danielle Turchiano