'It Was Insane': Mayor Of Kingstown's Tobi Bamtefa Told Me The Funny Story Behind His Reaction To The Explosion In Episode 3, And It's So Relatable
BIG spoilers for Season 3, Episode 3 of Mayor of Kingstown are ahead. If you have not watched it, you can stream it with a Paramount+ subscription, and then catch new episodes on the 2024 TV schedule every Sunday.
Things are starting to heat up and explode, literally, on Mayor of Kingstown. In Episode 3 of the Jeremy Renner-led show, we saw Mike starting to interact with Constantine, Iris keeping a big secret about her past, and the explosion of an entire parking lot of KPD cars. It was an intense last few minutes, and it’s bound to have serious implications on what’s to come. So, when I had the chance to chat with Bunny actor Tobi Bamtefa about all of this, he recalled the story of when he read the script. And let me tell you, I’m right there with him.
In the final seconds of this episode, Ian (Hugh Dillon, who is also the show’s co-creator) and his colleagues were walking out of the police station and headed toward their cars when a car exploded. From there, multiple other vehicles in the parking lot blew up and caught fire, and it was a very clear attack on the Kingstown police. This is the second explosion of the season, and it was shocking due to its scale.
Bamtefa was also shocked by this, and he had quite the reaction when he read the script for the first time, as he told me this funny story during an interview for CinemaBlend:
When the script landed in my inbox, I went through it immediately. And I screamed, I screamed for about 10 minutes. [Laughs] It was insane. I called, I think I dropped Hugh [Dillon], the producer, the exec, I sent him a message, like, ‘Yo, this is this. This is insane.’ And he was like, ‘Yup.’ And, yeah, so that was very exciting.
We’ve witnessed many explosive moments in Mayor of Kingstown as well as quite a few shocking “Taylor Sheridan moments,” as Hugh Dillon put it once, that serve as major turning points in a season. Every time, I feel like screaming for ten minutes, and this one in particular sent me into a spin like Bamtefa was describing.
At this point, we don’t really know who is blowing up these cars, and it’s one of a few very violent reoccurring things that have happened this season.
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Following the death of Mike’s mom, during her funeral, a car was blown up. I assume that this explosion is probably linked to that. However, we’ve also learned about the poisoning happening within the prison and how Bunny’s gang is seemingly being framed for it.
So, we don’t know how the explosion connects to Bunny and the Crips or the other gangs in this game. If I were Tobi Bamtefa reading this script, my questions after this moment would have revolved around who did it and how Bunny was impacted by it. And yes, I would have called Hugh Dillon immediately too.
Overall, this moment just signifies that peace is not in Kingstown’s future (no matter how badly I want Mike and those around him to find it). They have multiple bad guys to work with right now, with both Constantine and Merle Callahan coming in as big players, and we’re still waiting to see how Bunny will play into this game too. Currently, he’s on the defensive, and it will be interesting to see how he’s impacted by the explosion and the new players in the town.
Hopefully, we’ll get some answers about this explosion soon. However, for now, I’ll be mentally where Tobi Bamtefa was when he read this script and screaming about this shocking and literally explosive moment on Mayor of Kingstown.
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