What To Know
- Lioness has returned with a doozy of a Season 3 premiere.
- Here’s what the cast had to say about making that intense fight scene.
Lioness wastes no time getting back into thrill mode in the Season 3 premiere.
The episode, titled “The Spider and the Fly,” takes audiences on a ride from start to finish … and it looks like Joe McNamara (Zoe Saldaña) will face her most personal challenge yet. Warning: The following post contains spoilers for Lioness Season 3 Episode 1.
The episode begins with Joe telling her husband Neal (Dave Annable) and their children that she is taking on lighter duties, at last, but while she is driving to the office and on the phone with Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman), she is crashed into and abducted by masked assailants.
In what seems to be a flashback, we then see Joe running around on Georgetown’s campus and meeting up with an apparent spy who’s ready to gift her team Putin’s hammer in Russia. From there, Joe takes her team to Ukraine, where they’re assigned to target the asset — and have to go through a battalion of North Koreans to get to it.
What follows is a whirlwind combat operation, with trench warfare, drones zipping every which way, and attack dogs helping to neutralize the enemy. The scene is dizzying and beautiful, and, according to the cast, it was mostly made with practical effects.
“For me, it’s fun when I see it. When I’m in it, it’s incredibly challenging,” Laysla De Oliveira told TV Insider of the shoot for this scene. “It’s long days of running, full days. You have to really mentally prepare, but then you see it all come together, and you’re just like, ‘Oh, yeah.’”
Jill Wagner, whose Bobby is once again on the front lines, despite being pretty banged up in the Season 2 finale, explained just how real everything was for the cast in this moment.
“I don’t know if everybody knows, it’s like that was real. You were going to these football fields where the land and those trenches are real,” she explained.
“They dug all of that. That’s not CGI. Like there’s some CGI put in there, but but most of that is all real,” Oliveira agreed.
Wagner then continued, “You are in it, you’re dropped in it, and it feels real. And things are blowing up, and bullets, and it’s just it’s incredible the world that [Taylor Sheridan] creates for the actors to play in.”
Of course, the screen stars aren’t the only ones who get to play in it; Taylor Sheridan also reprised his role as Cody Spears for this bold new adventure.
Ryan Green / Paramount+
And if the opening salvo wasn’t mystery enough, the episode also closes with Joe facing another attack on her homeland: After she returns home from the mission, she enjoys a drink but is rattled when a middle-of-the-night knock at the door comes. It’s two men claiming to be “state police” and asking her to step outside. When she calls them out as fake, they attempt to break in, but Joe dispenses with both of them with her sidearm, wasting no time. Who are these people coming after her?!
Lioness, Sundays, Paramount+