“I don’t know if there are any good decisions he could have made in Season 2,” Gabriel Basso admits of his Night Agent character, Peter Sutherland.
That’s an understatement: In Season 1, all he was supposed to do was answer a phone and help the agent on the other end. A call from civilian Rose (Luciane Buchanan), after her aunt and uncle were attacked, threw him headfirst into a conspiracy that went all the way to the White House. After he saved the president (Kari Matchett), he was offered the job on the other side of the Night Action program (off-the-books investigations involving national security). Now, in Season 2 (January 23 on Netflix), he’s a night agent. His first mission takes him to Bangkok, Thailand, and then New York, for a threat that could wipe out Manhattan.
By filming on location, “we were able to get away with more cinematic, wider, cooler shots, and I think that adds something to the show,” says Basso, who praises the crews working in each country. (The Night Agent heads to Istanbul for Season 3.)
New Job, New Conspiracy, Same Trust Issues
When Season 2 begins, Peter’s training with fellow night agent Alice (Brittany Snow). Applying what he’s learned to the real world isn’t so easy. “You can plan for something, and then obviously stuff goes wrong, like in Season 2,” Basso says.
“Like anyone in a new job, he’s figuring it out,” explains executive producer Shawn Ryan. “Only in this line of work, one mistake can get you killed.”
Their boss is one of the show’s new characters, Catherine. “She’s a straight shooter,” Amanda Warren says. “She’s mysterious in the way that you can’t read her very well, which makes her very good at her job.” That includes managing Peter, and “it’s difficult for her to put him in a box and contain him,” Warren shares. But that’s also what makes him right for the job, and Catherine can see that. (Basso likens these agents to a “Swiss army knife of tools,” each with a different skill set.) She just needs to figure out his quirks and how to work with him — and fast. There’s a lot at stake.
Courtesy of Netflix
First, Peter is going AWOL while investigating a potential leak in the CIA. “He has a lot of trust issues from Season 1,” Basso explains of that move. (Hong Chau‘s Diane Farr, who brought him into Night Action, was part of the conspiracy.) After something goes wrong in Bangkok, he feels his best move is to protect himself and get answers on his own because, “If I arrest someone that was potentially involved and turn them over to someone who told them to do that thing, then I have no answers and I get hung out to dry.”
But after being “burned so badly” by Diane, for Peter, “trust is in short supply and must be earned gradually through actions, not words,” explains Ryan. Can Peter rely on Catherine, in a similar position to Diane, in Season 2? “There is a bit of hesitancy on both their parts to cooperate with one another,” Basso teases.
It goes further than that: “Can Peter trust anyone anymore? Even Rose completely?” asks Ryan. That bond is tested in the second season after “they really had no choice but to trust one another” in the first, says Basso.
There are also experimental weapons that could wipe out Manhattan. “The risk is high,” stresses Basso, and “life-threatening” for Peter and Rose, who once again gets pulled into the mission. The number of lives at stake, “puts an immense amount of pressure on him to figure this out, especially when he finds out there is a [ticking] clock.”
Season 2’s case also involves the Iranian U.N. Mission. Noor (Arienne Mandi) tries to leverage information she comes across to reunite her family in the United States. “We’re incredibly proud of [that] storyline and the authenticity that our team was able to bring to a story that explores a very different culture, where everyone speaks Farsi,” shares Ryan. Like Peter in Season 1, Noor “is the least important person in a very important place and is going to be thrust into great importance over the course of the season.”
Also looming over the season, albeit from a distance? The presidential election, which will “eventually have an impact on our story,” the EP promises.
Christopher Saunders / Netflix
Relationships and Night Action Don’t Mix
As Alice warns Peter, relationships are dangerous for night agents. And so despite how close they grew in Season 1, Peter and Rose are now very much living separate lives; she hasn’t even heard from him in months. “He’s out of sight but very much not out of mind,” stresses Ryan.
Basso likens it to soldiers who leave behind their spouses for deployments. “Peter is not the main character in that world,” he says. “No one cares that him and Rose had a great relationship in Season 1 — which I don’t think personally was that great. I think they sort of had a little Stockholm syndrome.”
While Peter’s become a Night Agent, Rose has taken a step back in her career to simplify that part of her life. The former CEO is now the lead programmer of a company, AdVerse, that uses surveillance technology for advertising purposes. She’s also in therapy for PTSD. “She’s a bit of a bad patient,” admits Buchanan. “She’s not opening up.”
Rose is trying to settle back into a normal life after the non-stop, heart-pounding world she was drawn into in Season 1. “She’s faking it,” says Buchanan. “I said to Shawn Ryan two things I think that should be paramount for Rose are that she’s not the same person — she’s trying so hard to get back to that person who was confident and owned a room, could do a TED Talk, could be a leader of a business — but also she is actively trying to get back to that place. She’s not just sitting in a room.”
Rose is drawn back into Peter’s orbit after “a mysterious phone call that makes her concerned for his safety,” previews Ryan. “She’ll try to locate Peter and help him in ways only she can.” She’s not exactly prepared for what’s to come. “She turns up in high-heeled boots and a backpack of clothes,” says Buchanan with a laugh.
But just because the two are teaming up once again doesn’t mean that they’re together. “There are definitely feelings there,” says Buchanan, “but Peter is not willing to show any sort of emotion.”
Peter is wary of her getting involved given his line of work, especially after he goes AWOL. “If you’re going to involve someone you care about in that decision, I think there is a certain amount of responsibility that you have to assume for them, and I don’t think he wants to put her in danger or is willing to assume that responsibility,” Basso explains. “He’s a little hesitant.”
The stars worked together to find the new layers of that relationship. “We just fell back into Rose and Peter’s dynamic” after the three years between filming seasons, Basso shares. “We knew how our characters would act, and I think that we tried to remain consistent and unaware that Peter and Rose’s relationship were popular things about Season 1. You never want to interpret what’s happening as this was popular in Season 1, let’s cater to fans this way. It should remain logically consistent, especially for it to be believable.”
Christopher Saunders / Netflix
Buchanan adds, “We did takes where he would play it quite angry that I had returned, and the showrunners and writers were like, ‘Oh, maybe … There’s still love there.’”
That love means the two can still work together professionally. “Not only do Peter and Rose have romantic chemistry, they also have this operational chemistry,” notes Buchanan. “She knows the way he thinks and approaches situations.” She also knows him well enough to see that while “she’s suffering, he’s even worse,” she continues. “She feels like he’s not the same person, but I think deep down she knows he’s still in there. He’s just so caught up with the job, and that’s all he can see and that’s all he’s focused on. She acts as a moral compass for him.”
Edge-of-Your-Seat Stunts
Good news for fans: The action-packed series doesn’t slow down in its second season. If Basso can do a stunt himself, he will. (He gives credit to his stunt double, Josiah Nolan, for when insurance mandates he step in.) “I do as much fighting as I can — not for me to be able to say that, but for the audience’s level of immersion,” the star explains. “I feel like it sort of robs the audience of something to be going with the character and then cutting away from him for a hit or a car stunt. My goal is to make this show as immersive as possible and constantly pushing production and everyone to let me do things, even if they might be hazardous to me, is worth it, and the end goal is worth it to me, to have someone sit there and watch a show and be like, ‘That’s awesome. I feel invested in this character,’ and not, ‘Oh, here comes a stunt, time to shoot it from behind the main character.’” (The biggest injury came in Season 1 when Basso’s stunt double Matthew Mylrea hit his head hard on a car.)
Ryan calls Basso “the most talented and natural actor I’ve ever worked with when it comes to stunts. He’s incredibly athletic, so proficient in his fighting ability, and he has a near obsession with getting the stunts and the fights right. We rely less on VFX and stunt doubles than I think any show that attempts our level of action, which is pretty high. Our action is meant to be very visceral, very grounded, and very exciting, and Gabriel is a big part of that. We have a whole bunch of people who work very hard to bring the best action and fight scenes to TV.”
Rose gets in on the action as well, and you can count on her to “literally grab whatever’s near,” Buchanan says before teasing a sequence in Season 2. “Very early on, there’s a scene with another character who I won’t mention, a much bigger man attacks her in the street. She was on the phone with Peter, and he’s telling her fight back, call for help.”
Catherine, too, gets in on the “badassery,” which Warren says was “very refreshing, very liberating, very thrilling.” Those were the days she had the most fun.
The action, of course, continues in Season 3, which contains Basso’s favorite stunt so far. “They let me do something that I can’t believe they let me do, and I only did it once because I think when they realized what I was doing, they shot it down immediately,” he reveals. “But they got it on camera, and then they all ran in and were like, stop this now. I’m psyched we got away with it. I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s pretty awesome.”
The Night Agent, Season 2 Premiere, Thursday, January 23, Netflix
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