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The star joins showrunners Nick Wootton and Nick Santora in previewing the action-packed spinoff ahead of San Diego Comic-Con.
Key Points
- Prime Video’s highly anticipated spinoff of the popular Reacher series, Neagley, is gearing up to introduce some serious villains.
- Maria Sten, who plays the titular P.I., and showrunners Nick Woottoon and Nick Santora preview the action-packed series for EW, which premieres Sep. 16 on Prime Video.
- Starring alongside Sten are Greyston Holt as Detective Hudson Riley, Adeline Rudolph as Renee Birdwhistle, Jasper Jones as Keno, Matthew Del Negro as Pierce Woodrow, and Damon Herriman as Lawrence Cole.
Frances Neagley is a woman on a mission and there’s no villain big or bad enough to stop her.
That’s basically the gist of what actress Maria Sten and Neagley showrunners Nick Woottoon and Nick Santora tell Entertainment Weekly while reflecting on the spinoff series centered on Sten’s fan-favorite character from the Reacher franchise.
It’s been more than a year since it was announced that Prime Video would be developing a spinoff of its Alan Ritchson–led drama, and viewers are finally getting a proper look at what they can expect with the original series born of author Lee Child‘s beloved book series.
In Neagley, the titular corporate security professional who made her debut as Jack Reacher’s (Ritchson) former military protégé and No. 1 ride-or-die with guest appearances on Reacher leads a show following her adventures as a P.I. in Chicago.
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The series will follow Neagley as she becomes hell-bent on justice after learning that a beloved friend from her past has been killed in a suspicious accident. Using everything she’s learned from Reacher and her time as a member of the 110 Special Investigators, Neagley puts herself on a dangerous path to uncover a menacing evil.
While Neagley is undeniably a force of nature, the P.I. won’t be taking on the underbelly of Chicago all on her own as she seeks to uncover the truth. Starring alongside Sten are Greyston Holt as Detective Hudson Riley, Adeline Rudolph as Renee Birdwhistle, Jasper Jones as Keno, Matthew Del Negro as Pierce Woodrow, and Damon Herriman as Lawrence Cole.
Ahead of the show’s San Diego Comic-Con debut, Sten, Woottoon, and Santora chatted with EW about what fans can expect when all episodes of Neagley premiere on Prime Video Sep. 16.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You went into this spinoff without any additional material. How did it feel to create something completely original for a character that’s already had a bit of a following?
NICK WOOTTON: I wasn’t involved in the original show so, I felt like, when we started talking about this character, it was one of the virtues that it was a total blank slate. There was on element to me that was so fascinating, which was she couldn’t touch people. She has Haphephobia. So, we really built a lot around, [the question of] why: What was going on there? What happened? What was the story? There was one kernel of information that we had about this character’s backstory that sort of blossomed into a season.
NICK SANTORA: It’s a great character that had a lot of blank slate that we could just make up whatever we wanted. And, you know, Woot and I have worked together before on two other shows, so we have a history of just making stuff up. It’s been fun.
WOOTTON: And we had a lot of behavior from her [appearances on] Reacher, so [we asked ourselves]: How does that person, with that level of badassery with this backstory, how do we line these two things up?
Maria, how did it feel to be going from making appearances on Reacher to branching off and leading a spinoff for yourself?
MARIA STEN: [It’s been] exciting but also nerve-wracking. The success of Reacher has been really astounding — certainly not one that I was expecting when I signed onto the show because I don’t think we ever do when we sign onto these shows. So it’s very exciting to be given this opportunity, but of course there’s also a lot of pressure [that] I put on myself to do well and to carry on the legacy in a way that pays homage to Reacher and of course also to the books that Lee Child created and the characters that he created.
And, not to put even more pressure on you, but Neagley is one of the few instances of a Black woman leading an action series. How does it feel to join that group of leading women?
STEN: I hope that I carry the burden with grace and with gratitude, but also with the awareness that there are not a lot of us out there and I think that’s why I care even more to show the world that this is a woman who can stand her ground, who can work independently. She’s self-sufficient and complicated and tough and strong, yet also has this much deeper layer to her that no one really gets to see until now. And she happens to be a woman of color and I think we can celebrate that.
Aside from not having the same kind of source material as you have for Reacher, how fundamentally different was it working on Neagley?
SANTORA: Well, I would say that the thing that was most fundamentally different was that we had to put a team and a world around her that was not gonna change each season. With Reacher, you have to create a world—be it Margrave, Georgia in season 1, a small town in Maine in season 3 — but it’s all temporary. It’s gonna blow away at the end of the season, including the great characters that Reacher befriends each season. [For Neagley] we had to think of a world and characters that would be beloved enough that audiences would wanna see them season after season after season, because Neagley is not a wanderlust like her pal Reacher. That was probably the biggest fundamental difference.
And the other was having a character where you really dove into what made her tick. What makes Reacher tick is gears and springs, and that’s about it. He’s not deep psychologically, that’s why people like him. He’s just a guy who wants to eat sandwiches and punch, and Neagley is much deeper than that.
Reacher is all about fighting the big guys. What would you say is the driving theme behind Neagley and the journey she goes on in the first season?
STEN: I think you can look at it two ways. What is true for Neagley — which is also true for Reacher — is that we stand up to the big guy if the small guy gets stepped on. Neagley is the one who’s gonna stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves, and that is certainly true in this show as well. The other aspect is that a huge part of the show is about trauma. I think as Neagley is investigating the mystery behind what happened to her friend, she’s also discovering what really happened to her in her past. And I think that there’s a through line of reckoning with one’s past that really runs through the entire show for all the characters.
SANTORA: Neagley is like Reacher —she’s a hero.
WOOTTON: Yeah. It springs very neatly from the DNA, like the willingness to take on a much more seemingly formidable opponent because there is evidence of wrongdoing and, you know, people who can’t fight for themselves need to be fought for. And that I think is very much in line with Reacher.
SANTORA: What I like about the Reacher franchise and, and [these shows] is it’s so simple. [Laughs] If someone is abusing somebody, if someone is hurting somebody for their own gain, they’re gonna put a stop to it. It’s such simple storytelling, but we try to do it in a complex and interesting way. But in that sense, Reacher and Neagley, there’s a reason they’re best friends. They have a similar moral code.
Obviously, having her own show is going to give fans a whole new perspective on Neagley. What kind of insights are you excited for fans to learn about her?
WOOTTON: The backstory. I think the backstory is — I mean, I don’t wanna give away too much, but it’s sort of like the backstory of the wellspring of her phobia. It’s so baked into the entire season and the story puts it to the forefront. And, for me, a great first season of any show is about the main character. Like, yes, there’s a cult involved. Yes, there’s a lot of stuff going on underground, but it really all comes back to our character and that to me is where this is very different.
STEN: When I first signed on to Reacher, I read all the books that she was in and I sort of came up with my own backstory. Of course, Neagley carries this huge mystery around about where her trauma comes from and I had to make sense of that going into playing the character. And that has evolved since Neagley became a TV show. I just love what the Nicks did in really exploring that because, of course, that’s the secret that everybody’s wondering about. So that’s the thing we kind of wanna investigate as she’s also investigating what happened to her friend.
So to dive deeper into her background and learn how she relates to other people — or fails to relate to other people, because we only see her really relating to Reacher in Reacher and so this is really diving into Neagley’s world and seeing how she operates on her own, and also how she struggles with that. That for me was exciting to figure out, what does Neagley feel like and look like when she is in her own world, not just coming to, you know, save Reacher’s ass? [Laughs]
We’ll also be introduced to the people in Neagley’s world, folks completely new to the Reacher franchise. How was it building the cast of characters that make up the rest of the show’s ensemble? What dynamics were you excited to explore?
WOOTTON: It was fascinating. It was sort of coming together as the episode’s went along, so you’re building the story and building the people that you need to tell the story and getting this cast together was amazing. Adeline and Greyston have more of a track record, you know, they’ve done more work so we could see material on them, they read and were amazing, and you got the real sense that there was no question about them. Jasper had done like, what, one thing—
SANTORA: One indie film, I think.
WOOTTON: One indie film, but the energy that he brought to the read was like, I don’t care what this kid’s done or not done, he’s infinitely watchable. What an amazing discovery that he is. Everybody was such a joy to develop. There will be a lot of happy surprises, I would say.
SANTORA: We knew Greyston was a really talented actor and we were very excited to have him. And then, when you started watching him work and doing the scenes with Maria, we realized, “Oh, we got a home-run hitter who also hits for average and steals basses and pitch.” He blew us away. And his relationship with Jasper’s character is hysterical.
Addie is such a pro. And again, that’s someone where we said, “Oh, we have someone that can really do this job.” And then, as we saw more and more, we realized, no, we’re gonna change some storylines and build some really big things here for this character because otherwise you have Addie who’s a Ferrari of an actor and you’re just gonna be asking her to drive around the block at 30 miles an hour. So we wrote bigger stuff for her. The cast is just great. And they’re all very, very nice people.
STEN: The one [relationship] that I’m really excited about is her relationship with Detective Hudson Riley [Holt]. I think she very much sees him as an obstacle in the beginning, or really a tool with the means to an end. And, of course, she learns that maybe you have to look at people in a different way. I think through her relationship with Hudson, she may learn something about herself and learn something about what it means to relate to other people.
What element of the show are you really excited for the audience to grapple with?
SANTORA: I‘m excited for the bad guys. The bad guys are killer. We have two sets of bad guys. And they’re played by Matthew Del Negro and Damon Herriman, and these are top-notch actors. The [character are] very bad people. In the world of Reacher, the bad guys have to be really, really bad because we’re gonna mess them up physically, so they have to earn it. And I think the audience is gonna love the bad guys, so I’m excited for them to experience that part of the storyline.
WOOTTON: There are some moments of audacity where it kinda just jumps off the screen. And I think there’s a few of those where I feel like it’s great mystery, it’s a great internal story, it’s a great emotional story, but there’s just some moments where it really pops. [Laughs] I’m laughing because it’s really funny to me, but it’s really painful to everybody who watches it. But it’s like, the fact that we were able to bring that out in this story was really, really fun. And yeah, the bad guys are awesome.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
