‘Good Behavior’ Postmortem: Juan Diego Botto Talks Javier’s Past

Warning: This interview about the Good Behavior episode “The Ballad of Santino” contains spoilers.

This is the hour Good Behavior — and Juan Diego Botto fans — have been waiting for. We learned Javier’s backstory as his family gathered at his sister’s new restaurant, believing that the patriarch was finally ready to welcome Javier back into the fold. Instead, Javier’s father wanted them all together so he could relive the reason he hasn’t spoken to Javier since he was 16 — Javier threw a stone at his little brother Santino on a camping trip, to stop him from starting a forest fire, and hit him in the head; Santino died because Javier didn’t know not to let him sleep — and force Javier to reveal his profession to his family.

Javier’s father got what he came for: Javier is now truly alone. Well, except for Letty (Michelle Dockery), who accepted the car keys from the broken hit man when he asked her to leave him, but then added that she’d take him too.

Yahoo TV: When did you learn Javier’s backstory?
Juan Diego Botto: That was pretty early on. I’ve never done TV before this. I’m used to films or theater — you have a script where you have the beginning, the middle, and the end. You know where your character is going to land; you know the whole thing. One of the things I was struggling with at the beginning was not having all the information, having read just two or three episodes. I asked [co-creator Chad Hodge], like, a hundred million questions, and I was very, very lucky because he had all the answers and he was willing to share.

So the thing about Javier’s brother was something that I knew while we were doing the pilot. It’s something very, very important for the character. There is something mysterious and kind of painful around Javier, and that is to do with this story.

Javier’s father tries to say that Javier was a killer at 16, and he’s a killer now. Javier’s sister thinks Javier believed his father back then and that’s what led him to become a hit man. Do you agree?
There’s this famous story about a French playwright, Jean Genet. When he was 10 years old, he stole something from his aunt, like some coins from her purse, and a family tribunal decided that this boy was a thief. They told him, “You are a thief.” In his memoirs, he says, “And that day I became a thief.” There’s something about the guilt that Javier’s been carrying because his father decided that he was a murderer, and then, as he says, one thing led to another. But he somehow had to prove his father right, that there’s something evil about him.

Related: Good Behavior Episode 3 Postmortem With Co-Creator Chad Hodge

Javier has made it clear that he doesn’t kill innocent people. Is that the “good” in him trying to fight through?
We should be very careful in the definition of “good” regarding this matter, when you take someone else’s life. But certainly, what I can say is that Javier has a moral code, and it’s actually a very, very strong one. And that was one of the most challenging things to me about Javier when I first read about the character, that he kills people for money. There’s no moral justification for that, but other than that, he appears to be a very nice guy, which is almost impossible. But he does have a moral code. He tries to follow the rules all the time. He’s empathetic. He cares about Letty. He’s not a psychopath at all. So how do you combine those two aspects of his life: what he does for a living and the other aspects of his personality? That was the biggest challenge about Javier, and what I think makes him a very special and unique character.

Learning his backstory made me think that Santino is part of the reason why Javier seemed so willing to try to help Letty be with her son. He couldn’t get Santino back, but Letty still has a shot to be with her boy, and he admires her for not giving up.
I totally agree with that. I think that in his mind, and his moral composition, keeping a family together and letting a young boy have a full life like his younger brother couldn’t have is something very important.

And that is your real-life sister, Maria Botto, playing Javier’s sister, right?
Yes, that was awesome.

How was filming that emotional goodbye scene? Did it help having your sister there, or did it somehow make it more challenging?
It really helped. I remember one day, we were doing probably Episode 2, and Chad asked me, “Do you know an Argentine actress who could play your sister?” And I told him, “Well, my sister could.” So she auditioned for the part, of course, and she got it. It was very, very helpful, because any time I looked at her whenever we say “mom” or “dad,” the whole history is there. If I see my sister crying, it moves me naturally — I don’t have to do anything to be moved. I admire her a lot. She’s a wonderful actress, and we had a lot of fun working together.

At the end of this episode, there’s that beautiful scene between you and Michelle, whenever Javier is trying to get her to take the car keys and leave. What do you remember about filming that?
Well, that was a very important moment, because up to that point he’s the one taking care of her. She’s the one who’s breaking all the time, who’s having a crisis all the time, and he’s the one who’s always centered and focused up to that point where he just lost his family and the only people who he had a connection with, his sister and his nieces. That is the moment you could think, “Well, this is as far as this Letty and Javier story goes.” He’s letting her go, and for the first time, she’s picking him up. That episode, it was all in one room, so we did every scene, like, a million times. We spent, like, three days crying nonstop. I was exhausted when we shot that scene from everything with Javier’s family, so going back to Michelle was nice.

Watching this episode, seeing how happy Javier was to see his family and how alone he must have felt, and felt again … it made me think back to Episode 2 and that sex scene Javier and Letty have in the inn where they’re role-playing being a married couple. Watching that sex scene then, it felt playful. But now you can really feel the layers. We understand how, especially for him, the idea of being with someone for 10 years is so novel, it’s a turn-on.
Absolutely. I think one of the interesting things about that scene is that most couples, when they do role-play, it’s about being something fascinating like two detectives, something thrilling. But for them, something thrilling and new is two people who’ve been married for 10 years. That’s something absolutely out of the ordinary, absolutely unimaginable for them. These are two people who have been alone for a long, long time, and it’s very difficult, being who they are, to be able to find someone with whom they can share all their secrets, and they have so many.

Related: Good Behavior Co-Creator Chad Hodge on Charting a New Course for Michelle Dockery

This episode, we also saw Javier’s past come back and haunt him when he had to shoot the nervous husband who’d hired him to kill his wife in the pilot. We know that Christian (Terry Kinney) is in custody and that the feds think there’s no way he committed that heist on his own. It made me wonder if this episode was about getting Javier to the point where he’s truly alone in the world, save Letty, so we’ll understand why he’ll go to whatever lengths he may need to when the feds come looking for her.
I can’t say much about what’s going to happen, but I think in this episode, we see that she’s willing to stay when he’s crushed, when he’s really, really down. So I think we’re starting to see that there’s more than just infatuation, more than just superficial attraction between those two. … What happens next is gonna be exciting.

Good Behavior airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on TNT.