'Good Behavior' Season 2 premiere postmortem: Michelle Dockery and creator Chad Hodge on what's next
Good Behavior is back, and as we quickly found out in the Season 2 premiere, Letty (Michelle Dockery) and Javier (Juan Diego Botto) aren’t good at being “normal,” even though they both want to be for the sake of her son, Jacob (Nyles Steele).
“It literally lasts about nine seconds, and she’s stealing school supplies and he’s already on a job killing someone,” Dockery says. “In the midst of this intensity, it’s very funny seeing these two people trying to be normal, and it’s exactly the thing that they’re incapable of being — ordinary. They can’t escape who they are and what they’ve done. So a lot of the second season has this foreboding. It’s like this storm brewing, and the FBI is hot on their heels.”
In addition to Agent Lashever (Ann Dowd) still searching for Javier, which Letty learned from Christian (Terry Kinney), there’s also the fact that someone sent a hit man to try to kill Javier — and Javier found Silk (Gideon Emery) murdered. “It’s not a coincidence that someone killed Silk on the same day that someone tried to kill Javier,” creator Chad Hodge says. “Who is this person, or group of people, or what is going on? Javier’s determined to find that out. It carries through the entire season. Season 2 is a much bigger story. When you’re alone and doing your own thing, you can kind of control a lot of your life, and a lot of what happens to you and what doesn’t happen to you. Once you’re in a relationship, and once you have a kid, and once you have responsibilities, and you’re a thief and a hitman, a lot of crap and s**t is going to happen to you. You think you can leave your past behind, but, of course, if you have a very, very storied past that will never disappear. The past comes back to haunt Javier and Letty in different ways throughout the season.”
While we wait to see how the mystery of Javier’s enemy unfolds, the more immediate concern for the couple in the season’s second episode is coming up with the cash needed to enroll Jacob in private school (since they can’t have a permanent address on record for a public one). “That’s the struggle for them: we got Jacob into this private school, it costs X amount of money, how are we going to get that money?” Hodge says. “Letty says she’ll do it her way, Javier says he’ll do it his way. She says no. It’s a whole fight. And then you’ll see what happens.”
They may not see eye to eye on everything, but as the closing moment of the Season 2 premiere reminded Letty and Javier, they need each other. “They are both feeling incredibly vulnerable and scared of what’s to come and this pressure that’s mounting on them,” Dockery says. “They’re not admitting it throughout the episode, until the very last moment. And there is this need for one another, which is what sort of brings them together again at the end. Because at the beginning [of the episode] you see them together in the bedroom and things seem to be going really well, and then they’re tested again, and so by the end, they have to lean on one another again.”
That moment of honesty on the beach, when they each admit they’re not okay, re-ignites the passion between them. “That’s the core of this relationship,” Hodge says. “There’s a line in an episode toward the end of the season where one of them says to the other, ‘We pull each other back from the ledge.’ They cause a lot of destruction to people around them, and often to each other, but, at the end of the day, they understand each other more than anybody else understands them, and they love each other, whether or not they’re willing to admit that yet. They help each other survive, quite literally. Javier saved her life at the end of the pilot, and she’s saved his multiple times, and, in different ways, they keep each other going.”
As Dockery sees it, that sense of danger is part of Letty’s addiction. “She was never gonna meet an ordinary guy. And this year, more than last year, it has this Bonnie and Clyde feel to it because they are on the run,” she says of the relationship. “They cause this destruction around them, but yet you want them to be together. It’s this to-ing and fro-ing of these star-crossed lovers.”
Fans may also want to see them have another great love scene, and, according to Hodge, one was scripted for the season premiere. “When we shot it, they come together and kiss, and then they make out and their clothes come off, and they have sex on the beach. But that just wasn’t right for that moment,” he says. “But in episode three, there is a great sex scene that I really love.”
Good Behavior airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on TNT.
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