Gabriel Basso on the ‘Morally Ambiguous’ Season 2 of The Night Agent

Gabriel Basso in episode 203 of The Night Agent. Credit - Courtesy of Netflix

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Season 2 of The Night Agent.

Throughout the first season of Netflix’s The Night Agent, FBI agent Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) operated simultaneously in fight and flight mode. On the run with Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan), a cybersecurity CEO being pursued by a pair of assassins, he followed his directive to keep her alive, all while uncovering a conspiracy within the White House, and, ultimately, preventing explosives from detonating at Camp David and killing the president. A newly-recruited Night Action operative, Sutherland saved the day (and the girl), and his adrenalized heroism quickly rewarded him with a promotion into the field.

Naturally, showrunner Shawn Ryan’s spy thriller threw a few more complications into Season 2—and, as Basso tells TIME, “it’s very morally ambiguous.” Indeed, Peter’s graduation to the field is filled with physical threats as well as ethical quandaries that muddy his black-and-white decisionmaking from his last adventure. Yes, he’s back again to save Rose and prevent another deadly (chemical) explosion from occurring (this time in New York City), but Sutherland makes specific choices—lying to an Iranian asset about her family; releasing a detained criminal; and accepting an illegal job from an intelligence broker to gain valuable, life-saving information—that, by season’s end, costs him his freedom and his relationship with Rose, and lead him down the same path as his disgraced father.

“Peter has never suffered for a lack of will,” Basso says. “He knows he has conviction. He knows what to do—but how to do it? That’s what I enjoy about this season.”

In a recent interview with TIME, Basso spoke about all the ins and outs of Season 2, including the challenging stunts involved, Peter’s complicated relationship with Rose, and a thrilling finale that forces him to become a double agent.

Read more: How the Ending of The Night Agent Season 2 Sets Up Peter Sutherland’s Next Move

Bangkok required lots of running and jumping

The second season begins with an exhilarating chase in the streets of Bangkok, where the crew shot for two weeks, as Peter and his partner Alice (Brittany Snow) get made on a surveillance operation and must escape gunfire on foot. Though Alice is eventually killed, Peter manages to elude a grenade inside a building, jump a few floors from a window, and evade his pursuer by diving into a river. “When they first ambush me and I sprint down that road, that's the first time Peter's been sprinting. But that's the sixth hour I've been sprinting,” Basso laughs. “So it's like, ‘How do I make this look like I'm not exhausted?’ It's a weird balance to try to find.”

While Basso always pushes to perform his own stunts when they call for it, he notes that jumping out of a window was a composite of him and his stunt double Josiah Nolan. “Josiah jumped from the window to the wire. And then I hop down onto the van and then off the van,” he says. “I just care about what we're hiding from the audience. I call it death by a thousand cuts. If we're constantly hiding something, at some point, the audience is going to not care and they're going to be like, OK, I'm not being shown things. The less I have to lie about what's happening, the less I have to act.”

Peter and Rose's platonic, high-risk relationship

Despite their passionate tryst near the end of Season 1, it seemed like Peter and Rose might not ever see each other again. But it’s not long before a call from Jacob Monroe asking about her connection to the FBI agent throws her into the center of his AWOL operation in New York City. Though she’s not initially a primary target, Rose uses her surveillance software Adverse to find Peter and help him discover what went wrong in Bangkok. She just can’t help but stick around to guide her friend to safety. “There were a few times where I was like, ‘Rose, what are you still doing here? Why have I not forced you to leave?’” Basso says.

“I felt like everybody sort of misinterpreted their relationship in Season 1 as this healthy thing. And it was sort of birthed out of a circumstance where they were completely opposite people,” he says. “The audience wants to see Rose and Peter be together. But I think for the sake of narrative cohesion and believability, these people aren't just going to run back into each other's arms and be like, I know we're being shot at, but I love you.”

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The preparation behind hand-to-hand combat 

There are too many close-call fight scenes to count in The Night Agent, but they all require the cast and crew to collaborate in unison. With usually just a few days to prep, Basso credits his fight coordinator and camera operators for coordinating movements and sequencing to look spontaneous. “I feel like this show is the most collaborative when we're doing fights,” Basso says. “Everybody’s got to be firing on all cylinders.”

He adds: “This fighting is a lot more mentally challenging for me because in fake or real fighting, your goal is singularly to hurt the person. It's like, he slips his head to the outside when I jab. I'm going to fake the jab and throw a high kick. In fake fighting, I have to sell this hit for the camera. I have to be acting. I have to remember the choreography, but also make it not look rehearsed.”

The most challenging fight scene this season? The factory that houses the mobile chemical lab, which forces Peter to wear a gas mask and take out a couple of terrorists attacking him. “Breathing in those things and seeing in those things was brutal,” he says. “It's like, ‘Hey, try not to hit this guy,’ but you can't see and you can't breathe. You’re throwing this hook and making it look like you're throwing it hard and hoping you don't hit [the stuntman].”

A fate like his father’s

Peter’s deceased father haunted him throughout Season 1, and his memory lingers throughout Season 2 as Peter makes specific choices that betray his country—like when he decides to take Solomon out of custody, sets up a meeting with Monroe, and agrees to steal an archived file from the U.N. Though they’re unlawful acts, Peter is committed to serving the greater good (and saving Rose) and gaining information about the terrorists’ whereabouts.

“There’s a term in skydiving and rally driving called target fixation. You block out everything, you have blinders on, and you will hit the thing that you focus on even if you don't want to,” Basso says. “Intent doesn't matter if you're focusing on it. I think that that's an important moment for Peter to realize, ‘Oh, man, it didn't matter that I didn't want to become my father. Like it's too late. I'm playing the game.’”

The treasonous act eventually puts Peter in Monroe’s pocket, a relationship that the FBI and his handler Catherine hope to exploit when they turn Peter into a double agent rather than detain him in a prison cell. “Catherine knows that I'm willing to sort of go against the grain to get something done. Monroe knows that I ultimately want to do the good thing. So I have a bit of a hero complex,” Basso says of Peter. Still, he says, Peter is a “liability.”

“I shoved Catherine into a bathroom, right?” he says. “You put your hands on a commanding officer, it doesn't matter if you show up to work the next day. That moment will be in the back of their mind forever. I'm a liability to Rose, to Catherine, to Monroe. I might be a double agent, but I don't think anyone wants to work with me. That is a utilitarian, morally subjective environment. and a dangerous position to be in, I think.”

Peter’s superhero speech

Before Peter turns himself into the police and gets a second chance with the FBI, he approaches Rose with a monologue straight out of Spider-Man, imploring her to forget about him and not get involved with his exploits anymore. “I think it’s that weight of being responsible for this person's life and knowing that she's not a Night agent—she's not read in on any of this stuff. She shouldn't be in this environment,” Basso says.

“[The government] doesn’t care if she dies or not,” he says. “[Peter] may care about this woman. He might even love this woman. But especially now that Monroe knows she exists, the government knows she exists, it's safer for her to not even be around him…It's the heroic, objectively good decision to say, I’ve got to do the right thing here, and as much as it pains me, I’ve got to let her go.”

Season 3 promises more thrills

So, Peter’s a double agent. Monroe has the president in his pocket and access to the White House. What’s next? There are lots of questions to answer in Season 3, which Basso says is “coming together” and that “the questions I had in Season 2 are now slowly being answered.” As for Peter, things are still complicated. “He's trying to answer that question himself of, ‘I can’t undo what I did in Season 2, but can I be a hero again? Or is this now my destiny to sort of be a fence rider until I get torn in half?”

Basso teases more. “It's an intense season,” he says. “I don't want to say there's less going on, but there's more weight to things. It feels like Sean and the writers are building to something great.”

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