Chelsea Peretti on Gina's Brooklyn Nine-Nine exit: 'You will laugh and cry'

Brooklyn Nine-Nine was miraculously revived last May when NBC rescued the beloved police comedy after Fox canceled it. The detectives will be back on the beat starting January 10 at 9 p.m. ET, but sometime during season 6, they will bid farewell to a fan favorite from the precinct: Gina Linetti.

Chelsea Peretti — who scores as the blunt-tipped, self-consumed civilian administrator who levels newly promoted sergeant Amy (Melissa Fumero) and newly acquired relative Charles (Joe Lo Truglio) — announced the news on Twitter in October, while also indicating that she would return in a guest capacity. “I want to thank you for the hours you spent watching Gina be Gina: confident, idiotic-but-smart, pithy, and infused with rhythm and cell-phone radiation,” she tweeted at the time. “It is hard for me to know exactly what to say.”

Meeting with reporters at a Brooklyn Nine-Nine event on Tuesday, Peretti spoke for the first time about her departure, which will involve a two-episode arc that doesn’t involve Gina dying. “It sounds cliché but I feel like you will laugh and cry, which I think is the ideal combination of an exit for Gina Linetti,” she shared about her farewell. “She’s very physical. There’s a lot of very silly things that she gets to do in these episodes. But then there’s also some really emotional, connecting scenes with her family and her friends.”

Asked if she’d made any specific requests for Gina’s final run of episodes, she answered: “I just always want big comedy moments. I just love physical things. Sometime Gina is a little dry, and I like when she gets to physically do stuff and the stakes are high for her. That was kind of my request and I got to do that, so that was cool. And then there’s some dancing, which felt appropriate — kind of bring it all together in the end. She’s a brilliant dancer. But also, I always feel like it’s important to show the friendships and the love as well, so she gets to explore her deeper feelings with people, so it’s not just all like, “Bye!!!!”

Brooklyn executive Dan Goor called Peretti “one of the absolute funniest people alive” when summing up her impact on the show. “I was sad that a member of our family was leaving but excited and happy for her to think of all the Chelsea comedy that she would be doing and that I would be getting to see,” he tells EW. “We have plans to bring her back in a future episode after she leaves — and I would image in as long as Brooklyn Nine-Nine continues, Gina would be popping in and out of it.”

For a first look at the season 6, including a case that will feature Gina going undercover with Jake, head over here.