'SIX' Postmortem: Dominic Adams Talks Michael and Rip — and One of TV's Timeliest Backstories
Warning: This interview contains spoilers for the seventh episode of SIX‘s first season, “Blood Brothers.”
This week’s episode of History’s SIX, Season 1’s penultimate episode, ended with Akmal (Zeeko Zaki) locking Rip (Walton Goggins) in a room with Muttaqi (Jarreth Mertz) after Michael (British actor Dominic Adams) had successfully convinced Akmal that the emir was going to kill him next. As thrilling as that cliffhanger is — presumably that truck carrying Michael and the girls to Boko Haram turns around, and SEAL Team 6 in on its way — it’s how we got there that’s at the heart of the episode, and, in fact, the series.
Trapped in a cell together, we got to watch Rip and Michael, the Muslim-American terrorist whose unarmed brother Rip had killed in 2014 as the pair was surrendering, have multiple conversations. We learned more about each of their backstories — and Michael’s in particular makes this some of the most timely storytelling on TV.
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The episode’s writers, executive producer Bruce C. McKenna and series co-creator David Broyles, were very malleable when you and Walton Goggins had ideas about the intricacies of the conversations between your characters. A particularly moving one was when Michael shares that he dropped out of college after his immigrant father was beaten half to death for being a Muslim, and Rip says college wasn’t an option for people like him — he only had two choices, jail or the military, and he chose the latter because he wanted to be a badass so his abusive father could never hit him again. What was important to you to convey?
To be honest with you, this character is one that I don’t think has been shown in this way in U.S. television before. I don’t think we’ve seen a terrorist who’s American, who is articulate and intelligent, and who isn’t some wild fanatic. He isn’t somebody in a faraway land that we don’t know. He’s a guy who grew up as an American, and that’s what he was. He’s a Michigan boy who loved sport and loves his college and loved all aspects of life until events in his life conspired that meant his whole sense of view shifted. It’s a very complicated and complex thing to approach. It was really just important to me that it was approached with responsibility and integrity to tell Michael’s story. Look, I don’t condone any sort of senseless violence on any side. But it’s about trying to convey why Michael truthfully feels that there is reason for his actions and why he got driven, and why he felt he needed to get to that point in the first place. So it was just so important to me to be respectful to that ideology, even if it’s something that is so different to how we think and feel and act as individuals.
It’s still coming from the same root place of emotionality and life experience. And it was just so important to me to make sure that we have that with Michael so that he isn’t some two-dimensional monster who, you know, just wants to destroy America.
Hearing Michael’s backstory, you can’t help but think about the concept of the immigration ban and the affect that could have on someone like Michael before he was radicalized.
The last six weeks, it’s only resonated deeper with me as an individual, and it’s only gotten more important — these are situations that can happen, that do happen, that will happen. And it’s just about understanding that nobody is right all the time. And my personal opinion is that in war, nobody wins. There is no winning when you’re already at the stage of losing lives on both sides. That to me is not a place of winning. And mistakes and bad choices and bad actions are taken on both sides. That is, ultimately, what this particular element in the show is all about, as far as I’m concerned.
Michael’s fascinated by Rip, and he’s searching for Rip to have the realization that what he did was wrong. He wants an apology that is truthful and that he feels is heartfelt. He wants to feel that this man knows that he did something that was wrong. That is ultimately, in a very simplistic way, what Michael wants in terms of Rip. And whatever validation that would create in Michael’s mind… would that ultimately soothe him? Or would it then just come back to the fact that he has his own demons and his own cross to bear as far as his own responsibility towards his brother?
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There’s that conversation in which Michael expresses that sense of responsibility, saying his brother would still be alive if it weren’t for him. Rip repeats a saying: “You can’t feed a lion lettuce,” and adds, “That’s what I am.” Rip then apologizes, and Michael responds, “It’s what we are.”
How powerful is that? It’s ostensibly showing two people that you would think are so different have more similarities than they could possibly imagine. And this idea of them being two sides of the same coin.
Michael and Rip then share a look, and Rip jumps up asking for Muttaqi, whom he tells Akmal’s sister has been compromised because she’s not answering on the game. That look, that’s the moment they accepted they had to work together to divide Akmal and Muttaqi?
To me, it’s they’d realized that they’re in a very hopeless position here, and the only way that either of them even had the remotest chance of figuring this out is to put their heads together, is to be in cahoots. And at that point, they’d spoken so nakedly, so vulnerably to each other. That’s what’s so fascinating: it’s like they share things that neither one of them has shared with anybody else before. They’re sitting there with their mortal enemy — this demon, this boogie man that Rip has become to Michael, and this faceless bad guy that Michael is to Rip — yet they’re there sharing intimate, vulnerable truths in ways that they’ve never done in their life. Michael has not spoken about Omar and what [his death] really meant to him to anybody. To me, it’s the first time he’s ever gotten that out. I can’t speak for Rip, but I would imagine that vulnerability of speaking about his father and his background and his childhood is also not something that he would’ve shared very often, if at all.
This doesn’t mean that they’re best friends, but all of a sudden, in the most unlikely and strangest of circumstance, they have a common bond. And they know that if they are to have any chance of saving their lives — and ultimately for Rip, saving the lives of Na’omi and the girls, and for Michael not going back to Boko Haram and being murdered — it’s banding together [in this moment]. There’s a begrudging realization of that, which has been earned through the last couple of scenes and those moments that these two have shared. So that look is absolutely the full stop, the period at the end of that realization that they have to work together.
The SIX season finale airs March 8 at 10 p.m. on History. The show has been renewed for a 10-episode second season, which will begin filming this summer.
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