The second season of “O Agente Noturno” arrived on Netflix on Thursday (23) and, at the time of this publication, is in 1st place on the list of most watched series on the platform in Brazil.
The thriller is based on the novel by Matthew Quirk and tells the story of Peter Sutherland, a low-level FBI agent. His efforts to save the president in Season 1 earned him an opportunity to become a Night Agent in Season 2.
In an interview given to CNN showrunner Shawn Ryan said that, after the success of the 1st season, actor Gabriel Basso knew how to deal with all the attention very well. Basso plays the protagonist and before the series was not a star. After the good response, he took his family to the south of the country and even got a bricklaying license.
Ryan also talked about how Season 2 moves away from the novel the story was based on. Check it out in full:
The series, and especially in this second season, really reinforces that there are not just “good guys” and “bad guys”. Everyone has different issues and is capable of both heroic and villainous actions. How difficult is it to write against these stereotypes?
RYAN: I think about the genre a lot because I’ve never written in the political action thriller genre before. Traditionally, I would say this genre has had more success in film than on TV. And I think the reason for that is that there’s a temptation to focus too much on the plot. This might be effective in a two-hour movie, but it limits the narrative in a 10-episode season.
The idea I had was: “Let’s explore the characters more deeply than the films do”. And once you dive into the character and decide that we’re not just going to show our heroes, but also the people they’re up against, you suddenly put yourself in a position to see these people as human beings, with their own motivations and reasons. to do what they do.
So in season two, we show someone like Tomás Bala, who is the British-educated son of this war criminal, and the internal conflict he feels between wanting to be part of respectable society and what he owes to his family. I think that makes for a much more interesting villain, if you want to call him a villain — because he ends up doing some bad things — than just someone who is generically a James Bond-style villain henchman.
With season two, you’ve now completely distanced yourself from the source material. What was the origin of the idea for this season’s story?
RYAN: The first season ends with Peter being made a night agent. He is no longer the least important person in an important place. He became important, but we had to make sure he went through growing pains. We needed to find obstacles in his path that he couldn’t easily overcome.
The premise we discussed in season one was how it was logistically difficult but morally easy for Peter. In season two, I wanted the situations to be morally difficult for him as well. He is, deep down, a very good and moral person, who now finds himself thrown into this world where, sometimes, he cannot do good and moral things. In the second season, Rose becomes his conscience; he cannot simply walk away, disconnected from morality. So the idea is that Peter is trying to do the right thing, but also trying not to lose too much of who he is. It was from these premises that we arrived at the plot.
How did you work with the writers, directors, consultants and cast to carefully craft the Iranian Mission plot?
RYAN: You want to be accurate, fair, but you also want to make sure you have people from that culture contributing and monitoring this storyline. We had a writer on the second season, Anayat Fakhraie, who is Iranian American, and whose father came from Iran when the revolution happened and never came back. But he has a lot of relatives still in Iran. We hired an Iranian American director, Ana Lily Amirpour, to direct block three, which had several scenes taking place there. When she read the script, she felt that Noor’s plot was really important for her culture and for her people to see. We also hired a translator, who had additional responsibilities to alert us to anything we were doing that seemed culturally incorrect. These stories, at the end of the day, are human, so you’re trying to write the human part of them, but you’re also making sure you have people who understand the culture to make sure the nuances are accurate.
How did Gabriel, and your working relationship with him, evolve from season one to season two?
RYAN: There’s always a little worry. You take someone who is a very good actor, but who is not yet a star, put him in a series, and, suddenly, he becomes the protagonist of the biggest TV series of 2023. And he is young. How will this affect you? In my opinion, he handled it very well. He didn’t fall into some of the traps that many young people end up falling into when they reach stardom. He just focused on work. He tried to stay away from the trappings of success, went south with his wife and children and got a bricklaying license. He managed to avoid a lot of the problems that can come with that kind of fame. But at the same time, he also became much more confident. Not that he wasn’t confident in the first season, but now you can feel that confidence. I really don’t know what his process is for delving into the scripts and thinking about how he’s going to interpret the scenes, especially because the work is so good that I’ve never had to ask. But he is extremely professional and prepared, arrives on time and is always ready to work.
What do you hope audiences take away from season two of The Night Agent?
RYAN: One of the cool things about this show is that each season is a fresh start. This is a challenge because you need to create a completely new world and many new characters. We as a writing team are just trying to entertain and satisfy ourselves, and then hope that translates to the audience. Knowing that the first season was so successful, that people not only watched it but loved it, makes me optimistic about how they will receive the second season.
This content was originally published in “O Agente Noturno”: Has Gabriel Basso changed after his success? Showrunner explains on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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