Netflix recently dropped The Night Agent, a new thriller series from veteran showrunner Shawn Ryan (Terriers, The Shield). Co-starring Oscar-nominee Hong Chau, and based on the novel by Matthew Quirk. The Night Agent centers on a low-level FBI Agent who works in the basement of the White House, manning a phone that never rings — until the night that it does. This propels him into a fast-moving and dangerous conspiracy that ultimately leads all the way to the Oval Office.
We recently caught up with the show’s stars, Gabriel Basso (Super 8) and Luciane Buchanan (Sweet Tooth), who dished on their unique approaches to preparing for their juicy, morally-centered characters. For Basso, he’s been around the block in terms of fight and weapons training. And for the New Zealand native Buchanan, it was more of a dialect prep, which she simply nails for her American persona in this pulp, action-packed series that’s now available on the streaming giant.
Tackling a ‘Grounded’ TV Character
This was Buchanan’s first role in a North American production, which made it particularly special for her. “I auditioned back home in New Zealand, and then my manager was like, ‘Oh, they like you. They want to see you again,'” she recently told MovieWeb. “And reading more of the scripts and looking into the book, it was just something that I’ve never done before. So I was really excited to do it.”
Basso opened up about making the character his own, with the help of a talented showrunner. “When I sat down with Shawn [Ryan], he was telling me how grounded he wanted to make it, and I got excited that it became more real,” he said. “My biggest concern was the responsibility on the show, you know? If I screw up, the show’s not going to be good. If I don’t take it seriously, the show’s gonna not be great. So it was responsibility, but it was also, I felt really motivated to take it.”
Basso then touched on his unique prep work in getting ready to play FBI agent Peter Sutherland: “I talked to an FBI consultant that I was put into contact with, but I also have a bunch of friends in law enforcement. And I fight and stuff in real life, so the physical stuff wasn’t new to me. And I shoot [guns] in real life a lot, so firearm safety and training is sort of second-nature. But the tactics of it and the approach to it, I was unfamiliar with. So yeah, there was a good amount of talking in that sort of facet.”
For Buchanan, meanwhile, it was all about nailing her character Rose Larkin’s American accent. “That took up a lot of time,” she said. “And 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, people’s names [for example].”
Season 1 of The Night Agent is now available for streaming on Netflix.