‘SIX’ Season Finale Preview: Barry Sloane Looks Back at 3 Key Moments
Tonight’s Season 1 finale of History’s SIX is the moment fans have been waiting for: SEAL Team 6 has finally arrived at the compound where their former leader Rip (Walton Goggins) has been kept captive alongside a Nigerian schoolteacher and her female students. As the short sneak peek below reveals, the team, now led by Barry Sloane’s Bear, does at least reach the girls…
In anticipation of the season finale (a second season will begin filming this summer), we asked Sloane to look back at three of our favorite Bear moments.
1. Go time. In last week’s penultimate episode, we watched Bear close his eyes and run his hands over the gear on his vest. Why? Just like real SEALS, they were encouraged to customize their set-ups. “The idea was to indicate to people that I know where it is at a second’s notice without having to think. It mirrors back to the pool scene in episode 3 with the blackout masks — just trust that everything’s within arm’s length and everything’s under control,” Sloane says.
Related: ‘SIX’ Episode 7 Postmortem: Dominic Adams Talks Michael and Rip — and One of TV’s Timeliest Backstories
Once Bear completed his own prep, he shared a moment with each of his team members. Because it was a mini musical montage, we couldn’t hear what he was saying. Our real question: were the words scripted? “That was completely adlibbed,” Sloane says. “[The producers] just wanted me to engage them all. We’re so tight. They knew what connection I had to each of the team at that point, and [that I knew] what they needed to hear and what they needed to see from me as their leader at that time. It stems from the wonderful speech that Buddha [played by Juan Pablo Raba] gives to him in preparation for that — to be the guy who brings them home. Bear’s finally at peace with where he’s going, and it’s beginning to empower him again. It was a great moment after what he’d been through in episode 5 and 6, with the crisis of confidence and crisis of faith and crisis of humanity. It’s nice to see Bear starting to get his back up again, ready to fight.”
It was also nice to see Bear and Caulder share those sweet smiles after the knock-down, drag-out fight they had in the water in episode 6. “Nothing we did during filming was remotely as dangerous [as that],” Sloane says. But it was a lot of fun, too. “When we filmed that scene, after we had the beatdown, we both broke down laughing and came together and you could see that they resolved it. However, in the edits, they decided to drag that out a little further. So it was important that we had that moment in episode 7 where you see that they’ve got past that s–t,” he says.
The two are kind of each other’s archnemesis, he says. “But they’ve each got qualities that the other doesn’t. They kind of make one decent person,” he adds, with a laugh. “If you put them together, you get a pretty good human, I think. As they are, there’s a lot of holes.”
Related: ‘SIX’ Episode 6 Postmortem: Edwin Hodge Talks Chase’s Backstory, #BlackRiflesMatter Patch
2. Bear overshares. As the season has progressed, Bear’s marriage to Lena (Brianna Davis) has grown more and more strained. In episode 7, as they placed new flowers at their baby’s grave, she told him she didn’t think they should try again for kids. But it’s the scene in episode 6, when Bear told Lena about a raid that hadn’t gone according to plan — how he’d had to shoot a woman and drag a child past three dead bodies — that sticks with us. She told him she knows it’s what he has to do to protect “us,” meaning Americans, but immediately, he says he shouldn’t have told her and leaves. She’s left alone to cry.
“I think it’s the sadness of knowing that someone has pulled away from, and the sad realization that they may almost be beyond repair,” Sloane says. “That’s the first time he’s ever opened up, so she knows he’s in a bad way. To put that weight on his wife is not something he’s ever done before. He’s absolutely at his wits end to offer her information about what he’d done. The fact that he closes the door, he’s basically just reinforced that door with 50, 60 locks. It’s like she knows there’s probably no way back in there now. It was a tough scene to play, because I didn’t want it to come across as petulant, but I wanted it to be something he used as a weapon at first. ‘Okay, if you’re gonna keep pushing, if you’re gonna keep asking me what’s wrong, then please have a little of my weight for a second.’ And then as soon as it’s leaving his mouth, he realizes that that’s not the man he is and that’s not anything he would like to give to his wife. He’s almost regretting it as he’s saying it. It was a wonderful scene.”
Related: History’s SIX: 5 Things to Know About the Navy SEAL Drama Starring Walton Goggins
3. The heart-to-heart with fallen SEAL Buck’s father (guest star Eric Pierpoint). Sloane played the scene beautifully, fighting to keep the tears from falling from his eyes. “Connecting to him at the time, his performance was so great, I really just had to listen. Sometimes acting is as simple as that,” Sloane says. “We’d all got so close to [Donny Boaz, who played Buck], that when the time came, god rest Buck’s soul, we were all feeling it anyway. We were sad he wasn’t there. [Eric] also reminded me a lot of my grandfather, who passed in the year 2000, and that was kind of swimming around in there as well, as sick psychotic actors do,” he says with another laugh. “I knew I just needed to slip on that pain for a little longer, and the skill was just making sure that I kept a lid on the pan.”
The Season 1 finale of SIX airs March 8 at 10 p.m. on History.
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