By Marie-Louise Gumuchian
LONDON, Jan 9 (Reuters) – Actor Idris Elba faces another crisis in season two of thriller series “Hijack”, when passengers on a Berlin underground train are taken hostage during the morning rush hour.
Two years after his character, Sam Nelson, survived a plane hijacking in the Apple TV+ show’s first season, the corporate negotiator finds himself at the centre of a new ordeal.
Like its predecessor, the eight-part season, which premieres on January 14, is set in real time.
In an interview with Reuters, the British star and Jim Field Smith – the show’s co-creator and director – spoke about the season’s setting and coming up with new twists.
Below are excerpts edited for length and clarity.
Q: What was important for you in taking the story forward?
Elba: “There’s a level of dissatisfaction (at the end of season one) with not knowing all the layers of how, why, what, when and who. And that was, I think, for us, maybe sort of the beginning of why we would come back, because there’s lots of things we don’t know about Sam, about the hijacking … what happens next … So, it was important that if we are going to come back, A, we could … widen the lens, so to speak. But secondly, be smarter.”
Field Smith: “The benefit of season two is a little bit of time has passed and the Sam Nelson you meet in frame one of season two is not the Sam Nelson we left behind at the end of season one. And you’re able to go, ‘What the hell has happened to this guy?’ And you are able to take him to a way darker place than we ever could in season one.”
Q: What personal journey does Sam go on?
Elba: “There’s a lot of determination with Sam in this season and the audience are asking themselves why … it’s sort of like trying to heal … It really does examine trauma. It examines what would you do for your family.”
Q: With all the plot twists in season one, what pressure was there to deliver in season two?
Field Smith: “We wanted people to start watching this season and be like, ‘Okay, okay, I think I know this show … There’s going to be some bad stuff happening around him. He’s going to key into it and he’s going to save the day’. And actually, we took it as an inspiration and we leaned into that and I think the twists and the way we’ve taken the character are, to a certain extent, exploiting the audience’s expectations of what we’re going to do.”
Q: How did the train setting compare with the plane setting?
Elba: “Comparatively … the constraint of claustrophobia is baked into how we make it, how we shoot it … we don’t make sets bigger, we go to scale … On the train … the claustrophobia to me was higher because you’re moving, you’re feeling that movement and you are standing in a mass of bodies.”
(Reporting by Marie-Louise Gumuchian; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
