Gabriel Basso Did Most Of His Own Stunts, And 18 More "The Night Agent" Behind-The-Scenes Facts
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🚨This post contains spoilers for The Night Agent Season 1! 🚨
If you're one of the many fans of Netflix's new thriller series The Night Agent and aren't looking forward to waiting for Season 2, here are some behind-the-scenes facts about the show to tide you over:
1.First, The Night Agent is based on a 2019 book by author and journalist Matthew Quirk.
Following the book's release, he said in an interview with the Real Book Spy that it was "inspired by a friend of [his] in DC who worked an overnight shift at the FBI."
2.The series blends the events of the book with showrunner Shawn Ryan's own ideas.
Speaking with Collider, Ryan said, "When I read it, I was immediately captivated by it. I immediately saw how it could be a TV show. At the same time, I didn’t think there was enough in the book for a TV show. I had been working on my own independent idea, involving the Secret Service, that ultimately became the Secret Service storyline with Maddie and the Vice President in the show. I thought, 'Okay, I think there’s a way to combine and weave these together,' and suddenly, there was enough for a TV show."
3.And the goal for the series was always for it to end up at Netflix.
"We were really targeting Netflix and hoping that they would love it and be into it," Ryan told Collider in an interview. "And that’s where we got to make it. I just think it’s the perfect place for this show. You can sit down and watch one episode at a time, a couple of nights apart, or I’ve talked to some people who’ve watched the whole show in a day or two. Whichever way you want to do it, we’re here for you."
4.Gabriel Basso, who plays FBI agent Peter Sutherland, looked to the past for training inspiration when preparing to film.
"I already was in shape because I fight and stuff in real life, and I compete and train," he told Us Weekly. "But I think the biggest thing for me was going back to early 1900s where their approach to health was health first, rank second, and looks third. And sort of the aesthetic and looking good is a byproduct of the first two. It’s not the emphasis. I wasn’t, like, starving myself or doing pushups before a scene to look big."
5.Gabriel's training paid off — the actor ended up doing many of his own stunts.
"I did all the fighting, I did all of the running and stuff, and the only stuff I didn't do, and Matt had to sub in, was like a fall or a car hit," Basso said in a behind-the-scenes video. "I didn't do any specialized training, but I fight in real life, and I compete in real life. I box a lot. I do Muay Thai and kickboxing. Grappling is fairly new to me, but before that, I've been in martial arts since I was a kid. Wrestling, jiu jitsu, and mixed martial arts, I think sums it up."
6.In fact, one stunt in particular had Basso in a chokehold — literally and figuratively.
Netflix
"I pick him up and I slam him," Basso explained. "He has me in a triangle choke with his legs, and I pick him up and slam him on the ground — and I was psyched about that because we didn't think it would work because there's no way of him helping me, and it was sort of dead weight in front of me. ... But it worked, and it's sick on the show."
7.Luciane Buchanan, who stars as Rose, had her own training to deal with — perfecting her character's American accent.
Born and raised in New Zealand, Buchanan admitted to having some difficulty with sounding American, telling MovieWeb, "That took up a lot of time. I had an amazing dialect coach, Doug Abrams, and he spent a lot of time with me. ... There was definitely some hard words for sure, [like] people's names."
8.Basso convinced Buchanan to go bungee jumping with him before filming began.
Basso explained, "I was driving up to Vancouver, and I called her before we officially met, and I just asked her if she wanted to go bungee jumping," adding with a laugh that "bonding through trauma" helped them forge the chemistry between their characters.
9.Like Basso, D. B. Woodside, who plays Secret Service Agent Erik, did many of his own stunts.
"When it comes to the fight scenes, I still like to kind of dive in there myself," he told Good Morning America. "I think the only problem now is — I can still do everything, but it’s the recovery period. I need a lot more recovery period now."
10.Before filming, Woodside put out a call on Twitter asking to speak to people who have worked in the Secret Service in order to prepare for his role.
11.Hong Chau didn't have to audition for the role of Diane Farr, the White House Chief of Staff.
Shawn Ryan reached out to her directly, asking her to join the series, which was "a really easy yes," the actor told Netflix's site Tudum.
12.Chau brought a lot to the character of Diane; namely, she was responsible for her character's striking hair.
"Farr has a certain gravitas to her. I needed to do something that would serve the character," Chau explained to Tudum, adding that she sent Ryan a photo of her silver-hair friend and Trust Exercise author Susan Choi to give him an idea of what she had in mind. She continued, saying, "Caroline Dehner, our hair department head, was totally game. She’s a wig master, so she was able to come up with this piece that was really nice. I know it fed me. I felt like a different person when I put that wig on."
13.Eve Harlow, who plays Ellen, also wanted to explore the world of wigs.
"The idea for the wigs was actually my idea," she told TVLine. "I pitched it to Shawn, and he was like, 'OK, cool. I’ll see what everybody else thinks.'" She added, "The fact that everybody went along with it is kind of astounding, because I feel like a lot of times actors have ideas and we get told, 'Yeah,' but then it’s never mentioned again."
14.Once Harlow found out her character was going to die, she guessed how almost immediately.
"I was like, 'Do I get shot in the head?' And he said no," she revealed to TVLine. "So, I said, 'Do I get pushed off of a tall building?' And he was like, 'How did you know?!'" Harlow’s reasoned that "because I’m a supervillain, I need to die in an epic way. And the most epic ways to die are a shot to the head, or you get pushed off a tall building."
15.There was some back-and-forth about whether Ellen or Dale, played by Phoenix Raei, should die first.
"We actually wrote some pages where it was Ellen who’s dying at the end of [Episode] 6 and Dale survives," Shawn Ryan told TVLine, "but ultimately, we came back to that. It was always a question of, 'What’s the better story for Peter and Rose?'"
16.Sarah Desjardins, who plays the Vice President’s daughter Maddie, and Fola Evans-Akingbola, who plays Chelsea, the Secret Service agent in charge of Maddie’s protective detail, had actually met before starring on the show together.
While flying to Comic-Con several years ago, they were introduced by a mutual friend. “I spoke to her for maybe 30 seconds, but I was like, ‘If I could talk to her for longer, I would make her my best friend.’ She just has such a beautiful, warm energy about her as a human. She’s such a kind, special person.”
17.The writer's room has a very special mascot — a Corgi named Scout.
Just reminding you all that we have an official Night Agent writer’s room dog, her name is Scout, and she moonlights as a bee when she’s feeling sassy
18.Creator Shawn Ryan wasn't expecting Season 2 — which was announced less than a week after the show premiered — to be greenlit so quickly.
"The pickup really did take me by surprise," he admitted. "I had been told that we shouldn’t expect any news about pickup until at least a month after the show started. So, when I heard over the [first] weekend that it was doing very well, and then when the sort of official numbers get released, you’re like, “Oh, my God.'" He continued, saying, "But I still thought that they were going to make us wait a little while. But literally, we got the call the next morning. I wanted to take the week to think about it, and the first call about the production and where will we film and the potential schedule, that preliminary call is going to happen in about an hour and a half."
19.And finally, it's likely that only a few characters from Season 1 will return for Season 2.
"The initial pitch for this show that we sold to Netflix was that each season would tell its own, mostly self-enclosed, a beginning, middle, and end story, and any future seasons would include a few but not most of the characters that we saw in the previous season," Ryan revealed to Deadline.
