It’s been a long damn time since Chris Pratt first introduced audiences to James Reece in Prime Video’s “The Terminal List.” Long enough for the actor to have two more children, for Hollywood to grind to a halt during the strikes, and for an entire prequel series to come and go. But Reece is finally back, and if you thought the first season was particularly nasty, well, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Based on Jack Carr’s novels, Season 2 finds the former Navy SEAL returning to a world that has changed considerably since his bloody campaign of vengeance in Season 1. Reece is a complicated fellow, to put it mildly. He’s a man who operates by a strict code of honor, but he’s also someone who took it upon himself to murder a whole lot of people. Now the very system he previously went to war against wants to drag him back in, and whether he’s a hero or a domestic terrorist depends entirely on whom you ask.
READ MORE: ‘The Terminal List’ Trailer: Chris Pratt Returns As Navy SEAL James Reece In Season 2
Speaking with The Playlist, Pratt and showrunner David DiGilio discussed why the second season took so long to materialize and how making both the original series and its prequel, “The Terminal List: Dark Wolf,” informed their approach this time around.
“We did a season of ‘Terminal List: Dark Wolf’ with the same crew,” Pratt explained. “That was important to do that season of television, not only to pay off Ben’s story, but also to introduce some of the characters that would be instrumental in this upcoming season.”
And while scheduling a massive international production proved challenging, Pratt believes the additional time helped them better understand what audiences wanted from the series.
“I would say there was serious benefit to the wait,” he said. “Having done a couple of these shows, seeing the fan interaction, it kind of arms us as the producers on this thing to go to the studio and say, listen, these fans want the book. They want it as close to the book as possible. We have the data on that. We took a few liberties in season one, and we saw that although we’re really proud of the season, you’re always looking at what you would do differently if you could.”
That commitment to the source material apparently extends to some exceptionally unpleasant violence. Without spoiling anything, there’s a particularly gruesome sequence involving a rather sensitive piece of male anatomy that readers of Carr’s “True Believer” will recognize immediately. And according to DiGilio, it was one of the first things fans wondered whether Amazon would actually allow.
“It was probably the first thing that fans called out as, ‘We will never see that on TV,’” DiGilio recalled. “The moment we announced it, that was the first thing in the comment section. And yeah, it’s there. We don’t want to go into too many spoilers about it. It is truly something that will make a lot of noise.”
Yet convincing Amazon to approve the sequence proved considerably easier than getting some of Season 1’s brutality past the studio.
“With all the trust we have from Amazon, our partners at MRC Studios, incredibly, it didn’t take that many conversations. It took one very early conversation,” DiGilio explained.
Pratt recalled fighting for a similarly brutal moment in Season 1, only to see the resulting image become central to the show’s marketing.
“I said, you see behind you that picture that Dave has? [A One-Sheet featuring Reece with a Tomahawk attacking a Sicario] It became the one sheet. We had to fight you for three weeks to do that scene. And it’s now like the crystallizing image of the show,” Pratt recalled telling the studio. “So all we ask is you just trust us because in the three weeks that we were fighting you, we could have done even more stuff for the show.”
With Pratt sitting across from us, we couldn’t resist asking about a couple of his other beloved characters. On the Marvel front, the actor offered a promising update on Star-Lord’s eventual return, saying plans are moving forward, even if he’s not quite ready to say when we’ll see Peter Quill again.
“I have a great relationship with Kevin and Lou, and there have been both ongoing conversations about how we make good on that promise and also hard action taken to make sure that we make good on that promise,” Pratt said. “So yeah, you’ll see Star-Lord again, which is very exciting, but I’m not at liberty to say when that’s going to be, but he’s not going anywhere.”
Pratt also reflected on his days playing the spectacularly incompetent Andy Dwyer on “Parks and Recreation,” revealing that he’d recently met with creator Michael Schur and discussed the freedom that comes with playing a supporting character rather than carrying an entire movie or television series.
“I recently had a meeting with Mike Schur about maybe, you know, and it’s one of those things where we just had a meeting just to talk about the future because I see those things come through too,” Pratt said. “And it is reminiscent of a time where I was playing comedic characters, and people really responded well to it.”
Schur, he explained, introduced him to an idea he calls the “main character dilemma.”
“Andy Dwyer gets to be Andy Dwyer because he’s not the main character,” Pratt explained. “The main character dilemma is they have to have some sort of emotional through line. They need to have a full arc. They need to grow. They need to learn. They need to be vulnerable. They need to be hurt.”
“What I liked about Andy Dwyer was it was like being a jazz soloist, but not the lead singer. Like when it was my four measures, I can go and do my little comedy thing. It can be different every time. Do some dumb shit, fall down, break something, rollerblade in and out of a scene or whatever the thing was. It was easy work, and I loved it.”
And for “Tron” fans, DiGilio offered fascinating insight into his original version of “Tron: Ares,” which began life as a direct sequel to “Tron: Legacy” before undergoing an extraordinary number of rewrites.
“It’s a very different movie when you go through 15 years and 15 writers,” DiGilio explained. “I was writing a sequel to ‘Tron: Legacy.’ So it is very reminiscent of that storyline, but every character in that story had changed because we had the original characters from ‘Tron: Legacy.’ The permanence code was to save Quorra, and Quorra is not even in that movie.”
“So it becomes a distant cousin to the movie, but I was so happy to see the Grid come out into our world because that was a foundational aspect of the script we were working on back in 2010 or so.”
There’s plenty more to the conversation, including the moral ambiguity surrounding Reece, how “Dark Wolf” connects to Season 2, and DiGilio’s inspired pitch for a “Parks and Recreation”/“The Terminal List” crossover that would see Pratt play both Reece and Andy Dwyer. Spoiler alert: Andy probably wouldn’t survive very long. Oh, and one hell of a story about Pratt crapping his pants…
“The Terminal List” Season 2 is now streaming on Prime Video. Watch our full interview with Chris Pratt and David DiGilio below.
Mike DeAngelo is a film writer, podcaster, and entertainment journalist whose work has appeared in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, and beyond. He is the host of The Playlist’s podcasts The Discourse and Bingeworthy.
