Yahoo Lifestyle ‘The Recruit’ Creator Alexi Hawley On Season 2 Finale Shocker, Owen’s Future As “Chaos Agent” & Feeling “Super Positive” About Season 3
SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details about Season 2 of the Netflix series The Recruit.
Like a number of streaming series whose production was delayed by the Hollywood strikes, Netflix’s The Recruit is finally making a return after a two-year break. Season 2 picked up where the Season 1 finale of the series, starring Noah Centineo as rookie CIA lawyer Owen Hendricks, left off.
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Abducted by his former asset Max’s (Laura Haddock), daughter Nichka (Maddie Hasson), Owen watched Nichka shoot her mom dead before she almost did the same to him. He was saved by CIA operative Dawn (Angel Parker) and her team only to barely escape being killed by her over his knowledge of her fake assets scheme. The two reached a truce and made a pact of mutual destruction, which Dawn soon broke, spending the season trying to kill Owen as well as Lester who also discovered her secret.
In a finale shocker, Dawn was killed in a knife fight with Nichka as both were after Owen — Dawn had taken an assignment by the head of CIA to kill Owen, as well as his companion, South Korean National Intelligence Service agent Jang Kyu (Teo Yoo), in exchange for a promotion, and Nichka had promised the American to the Russian security agency FSB for money. Lester protested to Dawn’s mission but didn’t stop her.
Once again, Owen failed to stay out of trouble in Season 2 and managed to get sensitive graymail delivered to him even when he was isolated in a “rubber room” with nothing but paper clips during an internal investigation into the Vienna fiasco from Season 1. The graymailer was Jang, with Owen, joined by his overstressed colleague Janus, send to Korea to neutralize him. Owen instead tried to help Jang Kyun get his kidnapped wife back, which took him him to Russia. The two were helped by Yoo Jin Lee, a childhood friend (and crush) of Owen’s from the time he lived in Korea during his father’s deployment there, who drove them to Russia on her father’s fishing boat.
An enigmatic international power broker, played by James Purefoy, pitched in to help negotiate the kidnapped woman’s release. In the end, the operation went south, with the kidnappers also taking Jang Kyun and Owen left by himself to try and rescue them after both after Dawn and Lester bailed out. Against all odds, he succeeded with an assist from Yoo Jin as well as an US Navy submarine, which surfaced just as a Russian coast guard zeroed in on Owen & Co’s getaway boat, which was taking heavy fire.
Meanwhile, Owen’s former girlfriend Hannah moved on with a new boyfriend for him only to turn out to be a Korean informant, leading to a blunt conversation with Owen as she was being held at a CIA site.
In an interview with Deadline. The Recruit creator/executive producer Alexi Hawley speaks about the shorter Season 2 order of 6 episodes vs. 8 for Season 1 and reveals Nitchka’s backstory and other elements that had to be cut for time with the reduced episode count.
Hawley discusses the finale and what may be next for “chaos agent” Owen, coming off his first win. He also addresses Dawn’s Season 2 arc and ultimate death, the teaming up of Owen and Janus as well as Owen and Jang Kyun in Korea, Owen’s — and Janus’ — Season 2 love interests, and Owen’s slow realization that his often impulsive and selfish actions have consequences.
Expressing optimism about a potential third season renewal, Hawley also discusses the casting of James Purefoy and Nathan Fillion, star of Hawley’s other series, ABC’s The Rookie, and addresses the recurring Anderson Cooper references on the show, courtesy of CIA lawyer and aspiring TV pundit Amelia Salazar.
DEADLINE: How did you end up doing six episodes in Season 2 and did you have to condense a lot to fit within that order?
HAWLEY: We did a little. Originally, we had come in for the writers room with the idea that we were going to do eight, and then, ultimately, Netflix reached out to say six. I like telling a lot of stories so it didn’t scare me; I’m like, Okay, now we’re really condensing it down to its core storytelling. There was definitely some navigating to do but I’m super happy with how the six episodes came out.
DEADLINE: Were there storylines you had to cut to make it as a six-episode season?
HAWLEY: Season 2 is the story I was always planning to tell, just streamlined down to its most propulsive version.
DEADLINE: Nichka’s backstory was one of the elements that we didn’t see in Season 2. We invested a lot in Max’s story last season, and then her daughter appears and kills her mom in the finale. Nichka has a significant presence in Season 2 and interacts with Owen but we never learned anything about what happened between her and her mom and why she’s in this line of work?
HAWLEY: Yeah, that is one of the casualties from condensing; we didn’t have quite as much time to explore with her. I did think the childhood drawing on the wall with a knife and her mom told a bit of a story, but yes, ultimately the backstory that we didn’t talk about is that we had set up that Max had married into the Russian mob, and then had this daughter. The husband was abusive.
The story that the world thought was that he had been killed by a rival Russian mobster. Max used that in order to take that guy out and take his territories. The reality is that she killed her own husband to frame this guy, and she hid the daughter and told her the lie about what happened to her dad. Nichka ultimately learned the truth, and that’s why she wanted to kill her mom. Sadly, that backstory fell away as we were doing the season.
DEADLINE: Will we revisit Nichka in a potential third season or is that arc closed after she was apprehended by the FSB in the finale?
HAWLEY: I’m not done with Nichka. I love Maddie, I think she’s great. I love that, in some ways, Nichka is very Owen in her chaos agent-ness, so I would love to see Nichka again in some way, shape or form. I don’t know where it goes yet in my head but I never want to say never. Maddie is such a great actor.
DEADLINE: Let’s talk about Dawn. For me, it was a little unfortunate that Dawn didn’t have much to do in the second season, she was focused on that crazy plan to kill both Owen and Lester. And then in the end, she got into that fight with Nichka who killed her.
HAWLEY: Dawn is a complicated character. She’s a bit like Max, in the sense of being a survivor, and she was working the system. We learned late in Season 1 that she’s the one who actually recruited Max, but kept that secret, that she was stealing money from the CIA with these pretend assets. So I think she’s just desperately trying to keep her head above water.
Owen is literally the only one — at least at the beginning of the season — who knows her secret, and in her mind, she would never trust him to keep his mouth shut. So she hatches this plan, which is obviously a Hail Mary. Again, those six episodes of it all didn’t allow us to dig as deep as we might have liked.
But I do think that her relationship with Dodge, who was the guy who’s there with her, there was some depth there. He clearly owed her, they had feelings, not romantic, but they went back.
I think ultimately, Dawn is just another survivor who ultimately can’t get out of her own way.
DEADLINE: Is Dodge out of the picture too, because I think the last we saw him, he was hit on the head on that boat.
HAWLEY: There will definitely be fallout from all of that going into Season 3, also, because Lester betrayed Owen as well, just by trying to bug out and leave him behind. There’s a lot of complications, which will be brought in to Season 3, hopefully. For Lester — Colton is such a great actor, and he’s so much fun with Noah — to have to live with the fact that he sold his soul to the devil a bit; he let Dawn go off to try and kill them. He ultimately made himself okay with everything in the hope of moving up the ladder at the CIA, there’s some work to do there. The question is, what is the agency’s opinion going to be of him?
DEADLINE: What about Owen and the agency? In the final scene on top of the submarine, he is happy and smiling, but then the smile disappears. He doesn’t know of CIA’s plan to pin every transgression on him. Is he going back to another mess?
HAWLEY: Well, the irony is that actually, we say it in the first episode, you need to win; If you win, nothing matters. And so a bit of the setup that we’re setting up for Season 3 is that that win actually will reverse all of that stuff because everybody wants to be attached to that.
He doesn’t know any of that in the moment. I love how complicated that last beat is, and Noah is so good. Because, coming into the season, he was like, I’m quitting this job, this job is not healthy, it brings out the worst to me. And then by the end, he’s had this win, he’s been through the fire, he’s managed to navigate all these different forces and declare victory.
But then you can see, under the surface, all the complicated stuff of, like, Oh, I guess I’m not quitting. There’s all this potential stuff that he’s realizing, which I think is great.
DEADLINE: When Owen started this job, he was this wide-eyed, idealistic guy, but then last season he killed someone, and that had an impact on him. He now claims he doesn’t want to become dead inside, but it feels like it’s getting easier for him to kill people. And we saw a different side of him in the video conversation with his ex-girlfriend Hannah, he looked ruthless, almost cruel. Talk about him descending into darkness a bit.
HAWLEY: It was really important to me in Season 1 that we didn’t round the edges off. Noah is such an inherently charming actor, and you want to root for him. He’s fun and he’s funny but at his heart, he’s 20-whatever-years old, and he’s selfish, so his MO has always been, I get myself in trouble and then I call on my friends to help me get out. And I’m not really thinking about the impact of that on them.
In Season 2, he is trying to grow up. He does try and go through official channels early with Lester rather than winging it. The moment with Hannah really is closing the door. Lester says it in a harsh way, but he needed to show Hannah how harsh this world that he’s in is, to push her away. But I do think that he was not lying when he said I was trying to be better. It’s just happened to him.
At the end of the day, he doesn’t actually kill anybody himself in Season 2 and actually he only fires a gun once, which I also love that we have this action hero that literally only fires a gun once, even though he saves the day, because it’s such a default on these movies and these shows where, whether it’s Harrison Ford, who’s supposed to be a CIA analyst in the Jack Ryan series where every is good with guns, and they’re action stars, and I’m like…
What was interesting to explore with Owen was the sense of tying the consequences of his actions to him, that you can’t say on a phone, I’m going to need to hurt some people, are you okay with that? Say yes and get away with it. And even when [Nichka] shoots the Russian guy in the houseboat and says, stop pretending that your actions don’t have consequences. That’s where I think the darkness is, more in this realization that he can’t just act like him running around, getting into trouble, it doesn’t impact people, in the same way that does with Hannah emotionally, It’s not just the violence, he’s also a little un-self-aware at times.
DEADLINE: The first Russian guy in the houseboat ultimately fell to his death but Owen attacked him and was the reason that person died.
HAWLEY: You’re right. You’re right, he got attacked, sorry about that.
DEADLINE: Speaking of consequences, was there a pivotal moment for Owen’s growth this season when he realized how much what he does affects other people?
HAWLEY: I think he’s still leaving the season very complicated, because part of what happened with Max was this realization that he was in way over his head, that she was a survivor who would do anything to survive, at not only his risk, but even if it was unhealthy for herself. He was coming into Season 2 with all his baggage, which is very real, but I think that ultimately, he’s still, in some ways naive, and part of the reason that he latched so hard on to Teo Yoo’s storyline was this idea that the guy is doing something noble.
But what we really felt in the writers room was this idea that somebody who’s willing to do anything for love will do some f*cked-up stuff, and I never wanted it to feel like it was a buddy cop show. Because Jang Kyun says it in the finale, I would kill you to save her, and he means it. That was really interesting to me, that Owen still ultimately risked everything to save this love story, because he needed to invest in something positive, because everything else around him felt so negative. But again, people got hurt while he was saving that story, so, there are still consequences.
DEADLINE: You said that you didn’t want The Recruit to become a buddy cop show, but that scene in the bar, to me, had a major Rush Hour vibe, Owen and Jang, with backs to each other, doing all these moves and fighting off bad guys. Was there any influence there?
HAWLEY: Not from Rush Hour, per se, I would go farther back to 48 Hours and stuff like that, because that was a relationship that had tension and stakes. I think those early movies, as problematic as they might look now, didn’t round the edges off of the fact that these are two people who want different things and are not friends, and you only get to a place late in that movie where you feel like they are actually looking out for each other.
And so what felt important to me was Owen getting caught up in the nobility of this quest. But ultimately, Jang Kyu is much more mercenary about what this is and only reluctantly realizes — and again, he even doesn’t believe that anybody’s coming to save them as late as right before Owen saves them at the end — so I really like that at the end of the day, we didn’t fall easily into, oh, they’re just hanging out together, having fun. Even though their relationship is a lot of fun to watch, and they were so good together, I just want to keep the stakes there.
DEADLINE: Will they defect? Will we ever see them again, Jang Kyu and his wife?
HAWLEY: I would like to see them again down the road. I think that they’re putting together people that Owen can turn to because, at the end of the day, he’s still a guy who’s a month into the job as a lawyer for the CIA. The volume of stuff he doesn’t know is exponential, he’s still very much a newbie but yet he keeps ending up in these very complicated situations.
When I sold the show, part of the pitch was me saying, it’s not a conspiracy theory show, but it’s a show about hidden agendas, and if you happen to wander into somebody’s agenda, there are consequences. And so I liked that Owen again, as the chaos agent, just keeps… When he gets assaulted in the command center just for looking up a code like that, I thought was really a fun moment.
DEADLINE: There are a lot of fun moments in season 2, many courtesy of Janus. One of the biggest changes this season was taking him out of that office where he was constantly stressing out, and putting him in the field with Owen, which proved comedy gold. Will that continue?
HAWLEY: Janus is such a fun character. One of the only things I ever said to Kristian Bruun, who plays him, to keep in his heart about Janus is that he’s always angry, even when it doesn’t seem like he’s angry. And he does such a good job with it. I love the moment on the plane where Owen tells that story about the Korean girl that was his first kiss and everything, and Janus’s like, that’s a very sweet story. If you talk about her again, I’ll push you in front of a train.
It was great to see him get out of his shell a little bit, to see him come into Korea and be a bit of a Koreanophile, somebody who actually does enjoy the culture, who’s into K-pop, and then this very improbable love story with NIS Director Grace Cho, that was partly found as we were shooting, because their chemistry was really special together. I wasn’t going to lean in as much in the early days in the writing. But then when we saw them on screen together, we’re like, oh, there’s something really interesting here between them.
DEADLINE: Would Grace come visit Janus as he invited her to continue this unexpected romance?
HAWLEY: I don’t know. At the end of the day, I got to think about where Owen is at the top of Season 3. I’d said early on with the show, because, again, I really was invested in not doing the traditional spy show work. The fact that he’s a lawyer, the fact that it’s his first week on the job, the fact that he has roommates — James Bond doesn’t have roommates.
Where is Owen starting Season 3 when he’s been through this much stuff, romantically, I’m not sure. Does he still live with roommates? I’m not sure. I did say early on that, the second Owen gets good at his job, I’m not interested, because the fun is him figuring it out as he goes along. But I do think that at some point\ you do want to feel like he’s starting to understand the system a little bit more.
DEADLINE: I got worried at the end about Yoo Jin, Owen’s romantic interest in Season 2. The last time we saw her in the finale was on that boat which was taking on a lot of water from the intense gunfire. Did she survive? And does she and Owen have a future together?
HAWLEY: They all did. Everybody’s down below on the submarine, everybody was taken on board the submarine in the rescue mission. Again, I didn’t have space to to do that. But yes, it was a happy ending, they all got off the boat and everything. Going forward, we’ll see. Obviously, he’s got a responsibility to her, because she is in trouble with the NIS, and so she also can’t easily go home.
But then, is there a long term relationship there? I’m not sure yet. Or does he look out for her and then they go their own ways? It’s too early days for me on that.
DEADLINE: By the way, that submarine appeared out of nowhere. Did somebody call for it or did it just happen to be in the neighborhood?
HAWLEY: The real in the writers room is that part of Dawn’s exfil plan was that submarine, so they were monitoring communications and when they heard there was a Russian coast guard vessel chasing Americans, they just assumed it was Dawn and came up.
We actually did get to go out and we filmed that 60 to 80 miles off the coast of Virginia with a real submarine, and got that incredible footage and managed to shoot on and around that boat. So that was really special to do.
And we also actually shot inside the CIA. We shot the exteriors, but we also shot inside the CIA, part of places that nobody’s filmed before, inside both the Old Headquarters and New Headquarters building, including shooting in the inner courtyard that displays the famous Kryptos sculpture. That was a really special experience to get, besides shooting in Korea, which was also fun.
DEADLINE: Was this your first time filming in Korea? How was it?
HAWLEY: It was a really incredible experience, the crews there were really great. Every department had at least one person who was bilingual. There was an assistant in Vancouver, which is where we shot the majority of the season, who spoke Korean, and we took her with us to Korea. We had a Korean first AD alongside our Vancouver first AD. We had a stunt coordinator from Vancouver and one from Korea. It was really great to meld those two filmmaking worlds and make the show.
DEADLINE: James Purefoy is one of the biggest names to join the show so far. Talk about adding the character of Rome and getting James to play him. Would Rome be somebody, as you mentioned, that Owen could rely on in future seasons?
HAWLEY: I was lucky enough to work with James on The Following, so that was a phone call I could make in the same way I could call Nathan Fillion or Felix Solis, that’s the benefit of experience. But I called James who just makes the perfect bon vivant, he carries such weight as an actor but also, there’s a sparkle.
He’s based on a real guy. There are these international fixers who exist in the world. I’m developing this show with Hulu called The Envoy, which is based around Roger Carson, the real special envoy for hostage affairs, who Felix’s character in the show is inspired by. And so when the real envoy goes to Latin America to try and get somebody out of Venezuela, there’s a guy who does business with them; they’re usually rich international businessmen.
So there are people that you would talk to, connected to Russia or China or whatever, there’s half dozen of these guys in the world who live a little bit on both sides of the law, but the US government, they allow us to talk to those guys. And so that’s who James’s character is inspired by.
DEADLINE: How did you get Nathan Fillion, a beloved TV star known for playing good guys to play this ruthless, almost evil CIA director?
HAWLEY: Yeah, that was a fun phone call to make Season 1 to Nathan. I’m like, can you come play a CIA director for couple episodes? We can fit all your work in one day and get you up here. He had a great time, he was like, I get to curse! Because Nathan is really a network television star.
And then Season 2, I just loved digging in deeper with that character and making him more mercenary and so I think ultimately, Nathan had a great time playing very against type, which he did a really great job with.
DEADLINE: Have you spoken with Anderson Cooper? Is he aware of your show? Would he appear on it?
HAWLEY (laughs): I haven’t spoken with Anderson Cooper. I did an interview with Jake Tapper, who is Anderson adjacent. Jake actually had reached out to Nathan and I during the pandemic because he and his at that time 12-year-old son were very big fans of The Rookie.
Nathan invited him to come to set, and when they came, we said, you should be in the episode. I don’t know if you saw it, but there was a Halloween episode where the doorbell rings. It’s Jake Tapper and his real son trick or treating, which was a fun little thing.
DEADLINE: Have you started breaking down stories for a potential third season? And is there a dream destination to go to internationally should you keep that as part of the show?
HAWLEY: We’re waiting for Netflix to officially do their thing with it. There’s a lot of goodwill inside Netflix towards the show and towards Noah; I think they very much feel like Noah is a bit of a homegrown star, which he is. So, I’m feeling super positive about it, as positive as you can feel in this town at this time.
I have been thinking about it, in broad strokes. It would be definitely nice [to film abroad]. We were meant to do a lot more traveling in Season 1, but the pandemic, really, so Doug Liman went to shoot in Vienna, everything else was shot in Montreal and faked it.
We were in Korea for about a month shooting that stuff, so it’d be great to do that again. I’m not sure exactly where I want to go yet. I feel like we’ve done Russia, we’ve done Korea. So maybe Latin America, Africa would be exciting. The American audiences don’t get exposed to Africa a lot in our storytelling for lots of reasons, but I think that would be really interesting.
DEADLINE: So you’re not in the writers room working on Season 3 yet?
HAWLEY: No, not yet.
DEADLINE: I want to ask about the the acronyms you use as episode titles, which I can never remember. How did that come about and is it me or are they getting longer and more complicated?
HAWLEY: What’s funny is, every title is a line from the show. I never remember what they are, either. So when I watch with my family and they’re like, What does that stand for, I can’t remember, so I get lost in them as well. They’re meant to be a bit thematic but also just if it’s a funny line. I’m not trying to make it more complicated, sometimes it just has a lot of letters.
DEADLINE: You mentioned funny lines. I feel like the second season had even more of those than the first. Will that strong comedic bent continue?
HAWLEY: Yeah, no, definitely. Look, I like telling story that way. I like it to be everything tonally. The world is a hard place these days, and has been, and so my goal is really to try and write shows that people look forward to watching, and part of that is being on a ride, part of that’s having fun, part of that’s feeling hopeful.
There’s all the stakes, bad things happen, people die, you don’t want to round the edges off of that, but the humor is super important to me. You just hope you cast a show with people who could do everything, and I just been lucky on both Rookie and Recruit. It’s rare and hard to find actors who can be equally as good doing emotional stuff or intense stuff and funny stuff.
DEADLINE: Before we wrap, I want to say, as a Russian speaker, that the second season has gotten better in terms of more authentic Russian. In Season 1, I didn’t understand why Max was a Russian with a Georgian last name, there were other questionable Russian names as well as the way Russian was spoken on-screen. There was significant improvement in Season 2.
HAWLEY: I appreciate that. One of my regrets on Season 1 writers room is that we didn’t lean more into the authenticity of that. We tried but we should have had somebody in the way that we did Season 2 with Korea. We should have worked a little harder on that. And Laura, to her credit, she’d never played a character that was like that before. To give her scenes that were in Russian, it was a big ask, I think it kept her up at night, so I appreciate you saying that.
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