‘Ransom’ Star Luke Roberts Previews the New International Hostage Drama
Get ready to be held hostage on Saturday nights — by CBS. Ransom, a fast-paced new drama set to debut on New Year’s Day, will dig deep into the intriguing world of high-stakes hostage negotiations. The show, which was shot on location in Toronto and France, stars Luke Roberts (Black Sails) as Eric Beaumont, the top kidnap and hostage investigator in the world, and Sarah Greene (Penny Dreadful) as Maxine Carlson, a newcomer to Beaumont’s team who has an interesting connection to him. Brandon Jay McLaren and Nanzeen Contractor round out the cast as psychological profiler Oliver Yates and ex-NYPD cop Zara Hallam.
We caught up with Ransom executive producer Frank Spotnitz (Man in the High Castle) and series star Luke Roberts to get the inside scoop on this unique international drama series.
Spotnitz tells Yahoo TV he was approached by French producers to create the series based on the professional experiences of real life private kidnap and hostage negotiator Laurent Combalbert and his partner, Marwan Mery. The EP admits it’s a world he didn’t even know existed, despite the fact that thousands of these negotiations take place each year. “It’s quite an interesting world,” Spotnitz says. “The stakes are life or death, obviously, which is great for a television series. They’re very adrenaline driven, they usually resolve within 48 hours, and you have to be a brilliant student of human nature to understand how to win these negotiations because often the things that the people are demanding are impossible. There’s no way to grant them, and yet somehow you’ve got to get these people to agree to terms you can meet and save somebody’s life.”
Spotnitz says his team consulted with Combalbert and Mery to get their input for the show, which provided them with a massive amount of information about this behind-the-scenes profession. “They’ve done thousands of these cases and they’ve written extensively of their techniques, which for us is incredibly helpful,” Spotnitz says. “We have all of their strategies and techniques that they use to disarm people — not literally, but figuratively — during negotiations, so we use them in the show. So that’s kind of one of the fun things about watching the show: You not only have the drama playing out, but you kind of learn something about how to negotiate and how to get people on his side.”
Ransom star Roberts says he was a bit surprised when he met Combalbert in person. “He was very forthcoming and helpful and personable, and I was surprised because I had heard rumors that he was quite intimidating,” the actor tells us. “Because you felt at any given time that he might be able to know you better than you know yourself in a way, sort of by reading the body language, listen to your tone and your pitch and the velocity of the words as they come out of your mouth. So I waded in like a naive actor and didn’t worry about any of that. … He’s really helpful and really humble, which is impressive considering what he has achieved. He’s negotiated hundreds of cases and brought a lot of people home safely, so it’s an impressive track record.”
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As for the fictional Eric Beaumont, Roberts says his character has an FBI background but a “much stricter, nonviolent policy” when it comes to negotiating. “He never carries a gun,” Roberts says. “He tries to avert any kind of tactical intervention wherever he can, and essentially he’s a peacemaker. A thinking man’s hero or an intelligent hero, I suppose. Very much a peacemaker, which I think is a valuable sort of figure in these current times.”
Roberts also says Beaumont has honed his perception, listening, and observational skills to an “almost supernatural” level. “He doesn’t have supernatural powers, he’s very real,” Roberts explains. “But he’s very, very aware of his surroundings and his situation at any given time. Almost sort of a meditative, Zen character. He’s very much in the now, and I think by being present in a way he’s able to, not control, but certainly influence, the future.”
While Spotnitz says Ransom is a “classic, standalone episodic television series,” he does tease an “emotional, serialized storyline” involving Beaumont and his protégé, Maxine Carlson. “What we learn the first episode … is that Eric has never lost a life in any of his negations, except for one — and that’s Maxine’s mother,” Spotnitz tells us. “She actually died in one of his negotiations. And so this question of why Maxine has come to work for the man who’s responsible for her mother’s death and the actual circumstances under which her mother died provide a lot of the mystery and emotional moments in the first season. She died, we learn, in sort of a cult compound in Missouri in 2000, and the leader of that cult is up for parole. And still hates Eric to this day, so he’s the primary villain in the serialized story.”
As for Roberts’s take on his character’s relationship to Maxine? It’s complicated.
“It’s an interesting, seemingly paternal-daughterly [relationship], but it’s a lot more complicated than that,” Roberts tells us. “Very, very early in the season … she knows of this guy and wants to work on his task force. She bluffs her way into his presence and impresses him, and he hires her against the better judgment of his team, and they begin their crusade together to resolve crises around the world and bring back hostages and kidnap victims.”
“It’s sort of a bit father-daughter, it’s certainly mentor/student or protégé, and very quickly she becomes his second,” the actor continues. “So she is essentially employed to second-guess his decisions to give her own perspective on it because I guess he could get carried away with his own brilliance. But he actually employs someone to contradict him at every turn, which is quite cool, I think. And that’s sort of a trick with negotiation. You’ve got to leave all the doors open and be prepared to be cross-questioned and second-guessed and cross examined at every point. So that’s her function, but yet certainly there’s an interesting relationship between the two of them, which you learn a lot more about as the series progresses.”
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Ransom is an international co-production with multiple broadcast partners (in addition to CBS, Canada’s Global, TF1 in France, and RTL in Germany will broadcast the series), which means a lot of hands are in the pot. But Spotnitz has been based in London for more than six years, so he has solid experience with co-productions. “What I’ve learned is that the clearer the creative vision, the clearer the idea for the show, the easier it is to rally your partners around what you’re doing,” he says. “And I would say that the vast majority, probably 80 percent of the feedback we get on any script or any episode, tends to be identical of all the partners. So it really simply is just a lot of people. Just a lot of people you have to talk to on a regular basis. That’s the hardest part about it.”
“There are a lot of opinions and a lot of voices and a lot of bosses,” Roberts adds. “Fortunately, Frank got some very good people together and he has a real clarity and vision. He really knows what he’s doing. When there are lots of ideas and lots of people thinking different things, we were all held together by him. And it has a whole international flavor. The fact that we’re shooting in France, some of the episodes are very European in feel.”
Roberts says he was drawn to Ransom because the role appeals to his preferred style of acting (“sort of the small stuff, seeing the thought change in the eyes,” he says), and also because he’s never seen anything quite like it on TV.
“I hope it’s very subtle what we’re doing with the show,” Roberts tells us. “I was quite intrigued by the idea of following the exploits of people who are often in the margins. You see the negotiators, but it’s usually the SWAT team or the tactical team that draw our eye. But these guys kind of operate in the wings, so it’s interesting to see their story. Especially because they’re private negotiators, because they’re not negotiating with the perpetrator of the crime or the hostage taker, they’re also negotiating with the good guys, with the cops, and with the law enforcement agencies and often even themselves. So it was really a refreshing, original idea. … I was just fortunate they selected me. It’s bizarre — suddenly we’ve shot six months of it, and I just returned home and it still feels like a mysterious, crazy dream. It’s been really, really good.”
Ransom premieres Sunday, Jan. 1 at 8:30 p.m. on CBS before moving to its regular timeslot on Saturday, Jan. 7 at 8 p.m.
