Interview: The Cast and Creators of "Banshee" Talk Stunt Injuries, Behemoth Bad Boys, and the Splat Cow Heads Make

Banshee is back and season two of Cinemax's must-see, balls-to-the-wall action crime drama is showing more testicular fortitude than ever. In a pair of episodes, Jonathan Tropper and Greg Yaitanes, the chief creators behind the series, have already blessed fans with a tricky moving armored car heist, an insane squirrel-crushing, a menacing hot tub stew of blood and exploded cow parts, and two seamlessly edited parallel fights showcasing the mental and physical strength of the show's badass female characters. 

There is much more to come as Lucas Hood (Antony Starr), the sympathetic criminal masquerading as a sheriff in small-town Banshee, Penn., attempts to police a divided community full of Amish and Native American thugs, duck and/or dig ditches for the gangsters he stole from, and ride off into the sunset with his former partner and lover Anastasia (Ivana Miličević), whose idyllic new life as wife and mother Carrie Hopewell has gone to shit since his arrival. The increased role of Nola Longshadow (Odette Annable), the tribal chief's mysterious, beautiful, and violent sister, and the introduction of suspicious Special Agent Racine (Zeljko Ivanek) and baritone behemoth gang leader Chayton Littlestone (Geno Segers) ratchet the fun up to 11—before ripping the dial off entirely.

Complex recently sat down with Starr, Miličević, Yaitanes, and Tropper to discuss the show's delicate balance of emotion and boundary-breaking action, the toll of shooting the fight scenes, and the future of Banshee.

Interviews by Justin Monroe (@40yardsplash)

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How badly have you been beaten up filming Banshee's fight scenes?
Every time we do a fight scene I get cut and bruised and battered. It’s par for the course. You know if you’re doing fight scenes you’re going to get smashed around a bit. There’s a perverse sense of accomplishment and gratification when you come out and you’ve got battle scars. Inevitably the guys that I’m fighting are 6’3”, 6’4”, 6’5, and 230, 250 pounds. It’s not a good place for a smaller chap like me to put himself, but we all work hard on those scenes and they come out pretty good, pretty rough, and pretty real. 

Speaking of the behemoths you play-fight with, what was your reaction when you saw Geno Segers, who plays Lucas Hood's new adversary Chayton Littlestone?
He's the biggest we’ve had! [Laughs.] I just looked at everyone and went, "Ugh, Christ. It’s going to be a hard day at work that day." But it’s good. Those characters will come in, and physically they’re just such a big threat to the characters, so anything that threatening is going to be good for the show. When we lock horns it makes for good drama.

Of all the adversaries that Lucas has had and that’s developing over the course of this season do you have a favorite adversary for him?
There’s one coming up that will lie in wait that I can’t talk about. In the first season it would be the albino and in the second season [so far] I’d say Nola [Longshadow, played by Odette Annable]. It’s interesting seeing Lucas getting his ass handed to him by a woman. A lot of the violence in the show is funny and entertaining. It’s not strictly fight-to-the-death serious. It’s a language of the show that can be light/dark and can go anywhere.

The ease with which she puts him down is remarkable, and she's no less menacing than the giants Lucas tangles with.
The show serves the female characters really well. They’re not pussies. They’re really strong women that can fight. There’s nothing apologetic about them, they do what they do. None of the characters on the show are particularly apologetic about what they’re doing. It’s in your face. We’ve had a great response from women and I think it's because we’ve got good strong females on the show. Females! [Laughs.] It sounds like I’m a scientist! "We have a good strong female contingent." [Laughs.]

There’s an emotional side to Lucas, but in his fighting and sexual conquests he’s the pinnacle of male badassness. Does playing him make you more or less masculine?
There are actors around who get carried away with playing a tough guy and then think that they are a tough guy. Then they go out to a bar and get punched in the face and remember, "Oh, no. Hang on. It’s all fake." I’m not one of those people. I don’t base my masculinity on how much damage I can do to another human, so I’ve never been in that world. I grew up doing dramatic comedy, so doing this has all been quite new to me. I used to do martial arts when I was a kid, so a lot of that stuff has lent itself to what we’re doing now. Once I enjoy the process I don’t lose sight of the fact that it is fake and they’re stunt guys who are trained to take a hit, to take a bit of punishment, and God help me if I ever overstep the mark and lose sight of that fact. It’s all fake and I’d like to keep it that way.

Banshee is full of balls-out action set pieces that you wouldn't see on any other show. Which one are you most proud of?
I'm proud of the show overall. I haven’t seen many other shows that straddle the action element and the dramatic side of it. It’s like a 50/50 split. What we've done right, is that it’s anchored in drama and character, so that really helps you invest. Because you give a shit about the characters, when they get in scrapes and fights you care about the outcome. That deepens the audience response to what happens in the action sequences. It’s a tricky balance. We’re a pulp show and we’re servicing the needs of the pulp element, but also trying to maintain a bit of depth with the characters.

Have Jonathan and Greg revealed to you how Lucas's story will end?
They’ve told me loosely where they see things going. All I know is that season three definitely has some things that are locked in. I look at it like, if season two is the big brother of season one, then season three is going to be the mother. Then season four is going to be the daddy and season five the granddaddy, if we get that far. I have an idea of it, but a lot of the things that have come up when they say it’s going to be X it turns out to be Y, just as the show grows and evolves and everyone has their input and other people come up with ideas. One of the great things about the show is that it’s collaborative in a way that I haven’t experienced on another TV show. Jonathan is extremely available to other peoples’ ideas. He’s not precious at all about his own scripts, so we’re allowed to give feedback and it’s not always taken on board, but at least we’re offered the opportunity to do that, whereas a lot of times on other shows you don’t have that opportunity to have so much input. We’re spoiled a little bit in that respect. 

Where would you like to see Lucas go?
I don’t have any other needs than the character growing and the world keeps changing and shifting. One of the great things that’s happening with the show and with the character of Lucas is that there is continuous evolution. There is growth, a man confronting himself and his inner demons and the existential problems that we all have: Where am I coming from? Who am I now? Where am I going? Do I want to be that? How am I gonna be better? Is what I’m doing right? These ethical questions that come up for all of us, in his own surreal, heightened way, Lucas is going through all that stuff.

What are the strangest reactions you’ve gotten to Lucas?
My mom and dad are in their 70s, and some of their friends who are the same age also watch the show and love it. It blew me away that we were reaching—we might not be widely reaching that demographic, but there are those amongst that group. It was surprising to know that there are old people sitting there saying, "Yeah, fuck him up!" and they want to see Lucas split someone’s head open. I don’t know what that says about the older generation.

Interview by Justin Monroe (@40yardsplash)

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When you started your career modeling, did you ever imagine you'd be throwing down the way you do on Banshee?
I wanted to be doing action and physicality and fighting! I was always a physical person. I was a fan of the La Femme Nikita, the original french movie, and I was like, "Why aren’t there more action female stars?" It’s not like we don’t have female athletes. It’s not the '40s. I’m grateful for people like Angelina Jolie and Milla Jovovich, who made that OK, because it’s so much fun for me, even though I bruise up quite a bit.

What’s the worst bruise you’ve gotten from filming a scene? 
I gave myself a black eye. I had a big bruise on my hip this year. I bruise really ugly. I don’t break anything but I bruise like crazy. A lot of it’s self-inflicted because I’m a little klutzy. I got the black eye when Carrie was hitting Olek with the stick—which, mind you, was a fake one made to be soft—and it bounced off of [actor Christos Vasilopoulos] and I hit myself in the eye. It wasn’t even a big stick! During the big fight in episode eight, I walked into a corner. Things like that. A bunch of us went to the UFC fight in Vegas between Anderson Silva and Chris Weidman and I know how I feel after a fake fight—granted, ours take all day long and theirs take about 10 minutes tops—but I can’t even imagine how they feel after a fight. I hope they get to eat pizza or something...fried pickles.

What was it like to witness Silva breaking his leg?
Horrifying! It doesn’t sound like it does in the movies. It’s not a crack like you hear in all those awesome sound effects. It’s this horrible, dull pop. And the year before that we went to promote Banshee at the Pacquiao vs. Marquez fight and there was the catastrophic knockout on Pacquiao. He face-planted on our Banshee logo.

And Silva went down writhing in pain on it this year. Great publicity for the show! "You like this kind of stuff? Watch Banshee!"
Come to Banshee. I guess. It’s just so violent, the whole thing, isn’t it? [Laughs.]

Are you a fight fan generally?
I prefer the choreographed versions more actually. I can watch real fights for a little while and then I get girly about it, like, "Ugh, they’re hurting each other!" And then I wonder, "How is this legal?" [Laughs.] It’s pretty gruesome. But when you’re in Vegas watching one of these things, you are horrified, but you’re swept up in it. It’s this hive mentality. And then you're like, "One of us!" [Laughs.] 

Humans have always enjoyed a bloody spectacle.
Forever. Whether it’s the coliseum or watching people be hanged or tortured. I guess that’s why people love horror and torture porn so much. I don’t, but I do love me a good sci-fi.

What’s been the most taxing scene for you on the show?
My attempted rape scene [in season one, episode five] was the hardest scene to do. We were shooting it for 12 hours and I was constantly being attacked. We didn’t choreograph it much, so it’s very sloppy and it kept not looking violent enough to the director, which is so crazy. It felt horribly violent, and again, my brain didn’t know the difference. This actor, Sam Medina, was really good and he kept being disgusting and saying nasty stuff in my ear and he’s attacking me, trying to rape me. Of course it doesn’t happen because Carrie is badass like that, but I actually at one point burst into tears because my body didn’t know the difference. I was like, "Am I really being attacked?" They weren't the kind of tears we could use. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Our show is, no joke, really intense to shoot. We end the season sweating, bleeding, bruised and crying. It’s full on. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The most challenging and in a way the most rewarding because I like being fearless like that, pushing envelopes like that.

What would it take for Carrie to leave the life she built for herself with Lucas?
Everyone would have to die, I guess. And anything seems possible on the show. She’d have to lose everything. But if that happened, then he would be a reminder of everything that happened, right? Because he was somehow a dark omen that came to the town, somehow he did bring the trouble with him. Yes, Kai was there, but he brought more trouble because the trouble that Carrie brought was under wraps. And sure, we can argue that eventually Rabbit would’ve found Carrie, but we’ll never know, will we?

Interview by Justin Monroe (@40yardsplash)

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In the five episodes I've seen, there seems to be more humor than in season one, at times bordering on camp, like when Rabbit wakes up and squeezes the hell out of a petrified squirrel. Was increased humor something you discussed going into this season?
I don’t view it as camp. I do think the show has pulpiness to it. We go for moments other people are afraid to tackle and you will be entertained by. I think of it more as entertainment than direct humor. We were talking about a good way to reintroduce Rabbit and I just thought what Jonathan came up with was great. You wouldn’t expect that and it kind of instantly tells you the show you’re going to be watching.

There are two gigantic foes for Lucas in the first half of the season, played by 6'4" Geno Segers and 6'4½" Ólafur Darri Ólafsson. Are you attempting to cast a series of increasingly more massive adversaries for Lucas? 
Dude, if you are a big guy we have a job for you on Banshee. [Laughs.] There’s this great story about when Michael Bay was doing Armageddon, he wanted the biggest African American guy he could find to be in the movie. One day, a casting director I know from Texas calls him and he's like, "We’ve got your guy." "What do you mean, you’ve got our guy? Is he big?" "He’s big." "How big is he?" "You know Shaq?" "Yeah, I know Shaq." "Shaq is this guy’s bitch." [Laughs.] I never forgot that and I always think about what every guy makes the other guy look like. Chayton (Segers) is bigger than the albino [from season one]. Jonah (Ólafsson) is bigger than him. What I love is that we have great characters. Interestingly we also go the other way, where Special Agent Racine (Zeljko Ivanek) is as deadly as Chayton in his own way. You don’t have to be big in stature to be threatening, but we do love a big guy on Banshee.

Chayton is the leader of a Native American gang called the Red Bones. Was there much research done on such gangs?
We do know they exist. We work with the community of Native Americans in the southeast for the show and we take our connection with them seriously. At the same time, we’re still doing a heightened world. When we did the funeral scene that opens up episode four, the Native Americans that were a part of it appreciated it because it was authentic. We have a Native American technical consultant making sure that we try to make the tribal council room authentic, and in episode eight of season one, when Chief Benjamin Longshadow (Russell Means) dies, we wanted to make sure that that ritual and all the things around it were authentic and things are happening even in the background that would be there. We tried to honor the culture and also make a heightened world of it as well. It’s actually an area we take great pride in.

Is it a similar case with the Amish community?
The Amish community is interesting because they’re more of an enigma. We’ve watched documentaries because that’s the only way we could access it. We haven’t found somebody who went on rumschpringe and never returned, but we have enough sense of the culture.

What did you guys use for the slaughterhouse explosion when all the cow parts are flying?
Oh my god. It’s like all these plastic parts and rubbery things. The meetings about the cow head that splats on the ground, you’re just like, "I love my job. I’m sitting in a meeting talking about how a cow head is going to splat on the ground." If you look at the storyboards, it’s exactly what we wanted.

What sort of finer points of that discussion? 
It was about the heft. Does it splatter? Does it bounce? What does it sound like? What does it look like? I wanted it to drop like a wet sack of meat, hit and not move, but then it looked a little too frozen so it was a mix of a real thing that we enhanced with visual effects, which is a good signature for us. We had this cow head on a stick and slammed it down. I was like, "It’s bouncing too much!" Then we had to give it more weight. It was very funny.

Speaking of Banshee's award-winning visual effects, how do they inform the show?
What I like is that it remains a thing that we use to enhance. It’s a tool for us to move faster. We’re still a scrappy show that needs to be resourceful. Interestingly, when we did the bus sequence that we won the Emmy for, visual effects, while an expensive sequence, was a fifth cheaper than actually doing it for real. Trying to close a New York street, prep a bus to fall, get a bus, get a stunt, rig it. It was impossible, in fact. I was actually worried we wouldn’t win the Emmy because it [looked] too good. You don’t know that every single car in the pilot of Banshee was manufactured in that sequence. It was an empty street of orange cones. This season's truck heist is another great example because we use visual effects to trick the eye and enhance something that might not be practical with the time that we have.

How do you approach the year-to-year renewal process?
I do two things: I’m both optimistic that we’re going to be around for that next year and I also don’t leave anything on the table. I feel like the season finale of season two, a lot of shows would be fortunate to have that kind of series finale. We decide to do what people would’ve expected to be our series finale to be the end of season two and that leaves, "What the hell is gonna happen in season three?" We have a pretty good idea about what that is.

How far do you see this story going?
I feel like there’s no limit to it. We know where we’d like to end the story. Whether there’s an offshoot or something happens, that’s why we set up these sister cities. My dream is that Banshee is a brand of storytelling the way Sin City is, that we can tell other yarns under the Banshee umbrella, that Banshee gets known as a way that stories are told, an expectation of what you’re going to come and get at the table. But in terms of the story of Lucas Hood, I would love to see that go for five years, and part of that journey is knowing that we can achieve that.

So Banshee the series can stray far from Banshee the town?
Banshee is the town, but we’ve got the Banshee: Origins graphic novel, Banshee takes place in New York, we have aspects of New Orleans that are going to get teased this year. Nothing is by accident. Jonathan wrote and did the visuals on on the graphic novel. That tells an origin story, but really it lays the pipe for season two. We introduce Racine in the comic book, we introduce some story elements that are going to get visited.  We feel like it’s such a big story that we can’t just simply contain it within the show. That’s why we have the origin content on welcometobanshee.com.

What other nuggets do you have for hardcore fans?
Our title sequence changes every week; there’s numerology embedded in the title sequence, which fans are always talking about, and it ties back into the story. We guide that. We make sure that we’re there for the journey of the fan. If the fan wants to come with us to the deepest bottom place, I’ve got something waiting for them. I have Easter eggs in season two. A rabid fan of this particular show is going to pick up on that. Patia Prouty, the costume designer called me and asked, "What’s the prison number on Carrie?" If you look at Carrie’s prison number, it’s the same numbers that are in the title sequence and you’ll see those numbers reoccur visually or be significant to the story. Sometimes people catch those things. They’re looking for that stuff, and if they wanna look it’s there.

How were the various characters' fighting styles and level of proficiency in martial arts determined?
Jonathan always says he never wants it to be two people being like, "My kung fu is better than your kung fu." We were careful that everybody is doing something a little different. Marcus Yeung is our fight choreographer. If there’s anybody I have to pull back it’s that guy. He’s the nicest, sweetest guy and he comes up with the sickest shit you’ve ever seen. Sometimes you’re like, "Dude, we cannot," just because it doesn't fit the show sometimes. We’re careful that things don’t look choreographed and that you don't anticipate them. Jonathan and I love Big Trouble in Little China, They Live, True Romance, all these things. If we’re going to do a man-woman fight, we’re going to do the best man woman fight you’ve ever seen. That’s why episode eight was the entire set piece. When Proctor and Lucas are beating the crap out of each other in episode nine, I wanted to "out-They Live" They Live, which had that great five-minute fight sequence. We get pumped on what we’re making and the fact that the fight choreography works so seamlessly to tell more story. Sometimes we approach it we’re like, "When he’s breaking into the casino, I want it to be more like a video game. He’s gonna take out one guy, he’s gonna take out three, and then he’s gonna get to the princess at the top." There's the original Old Boy homage with the fight down the hallway. We were actually jammed on time but we were like, "Can we do it?" Ant nailed everything for that final take and I have a great camera operator and a great choreographer in Marcus Yeung.

Obviously plot comes first, but do you and Jonathan plot dream fights between his badass characters? 
Yes. We were actually just talking about next season and [SPOILER ALERT] we’d love to get Nola and Burton to throw down. What would that look like? We geek out on those sort of things. It always starts out with, "Wouldn’t it be cool...?" Like, "Wouldn’t it be cool to see Nola and Chayton talking to each other? What would that look like?" We talk about things like that that excite us, odd pairings, like, "Who can you put in a car together? Who can you put in a room together?" We have such a great ensemble. Alexa Fogel is our casting director—she cast Oz in The Wire and she found all this great talent.

Interview by Justin Monroe (@40yardsplash)

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What do you consider to be the show's greatest achievement so far?
In general, the combination of a character-driven show that is equally driven by action doesn’t exist anywhere. The fear—and I had this fear, too—is that if we hang our hat on the action people won’t take the characters seriously, but we decided to just own that and say we want to be a show that does both. I’m proud that we don’t shy away from either. We can spend a show  developing emotional relationships and going deep into the characters histories and traumas and at the same time do a huge action set piece that you won’t see on any other show on television. It’s having that hybrid of a show where people can latch onto characters they care about and at the same time get off on some of the action we’re doing.

Have there been any scenes particular that stood out for you? 
The highway heist that we did in episode one of season two. How often do you get to shut down 16 miles of interstate to shoot? That took a lot of doing. That was a lot of fun because I had originally conceived of that for the graphic novel, which it’s in, but when I conceived of that I never imagined having to implement it in real physical terms. And I don't want to spoil it but I'm very happy with a scene we created at the end of season two.

I asked Greg about the show's humor and he felt it was more pulpy than outright humorous. Do you agree?
That’s just something in all my writing. I’m a novelist first and I wrote a bunch of books and everything I write I just find people are more interesting when there’s an element of humor to it. Otherwise you just start to get bogged down by the gravity of everything. So whether I’m writing a novel about a guy mourning the death of his father or whether I’m writing a show about people killing each other, you want to hear characters speak and be funny and witty. Especially a show like Banshee, which is so heightened, there has to be an element of comedy, too. We take our characters seriously, but if you take the show itself as a serious drama it doesn’t work. It works as something that sort of exists in this hybrid reality between drama and heightened action.

As a writer, how are you enjoying the long-form possibilities of writing for television, as opposed to a novel or screenplay?
It’s the first time I’ve experienced the ability to return to characters because I’ve never written sequels. There’s something really satisfying if you’ve created a bunch of characters that have withstood 25 episodes. I can now sit down and write and I know these guys so well so they come out so easily. The new guys, I gotta focus on a little bit more, but I can write the original characters in my sleep already. There’s something great about having 11 series regulars in your arsenal and knowing how to write them after 20-some odd episodes.

What was the genesis of the Chayton Littlestone character?
We were thrilled with the feedback from season one on the albino, but I found every time we created a great character we killed him, so we wanted to come up with somebody who would get the same reaction as the albino, who would inspire that kind of fear, but would also be a real character that I could keep around. So I came up with Chayton and I made sure not to kill him right away.

How important is it to you that nobody be seen as strictly a hero or a villain?
We’re careful about the fact that nobody’s evil and nobody’s innocent, and that includes Lucas. Everyone is capable of very bad behavior, but they're also sympathetic on some level. Like you could see whatever Nola does and know that there’s some pain back there, that she was clearly mistreated when she was younger. Even Chayton has a pure motivation for being who he is.

There are allusions to Nola and Chayton's back stories. Will those be explored more?
We don’t always have the real estate to explore every back story so sometimes we just imply. We have them all. You need to have them in order to just imply them, but at some point it takes you into another show, so we’re pretty careful about it.

Might we see their stories explored if the Banshee series branches out?
I think Nola deserves her own line of comic books.

Is there a story behind the idea of Proctor dumping all the blood and cow parts into Alex Longshadow's hot tub and menacing him after the slaughterhouse explosion?
That was our answer to The Godfather, putting a horse’s head in the guy’s bed. And then one of our writers in the writer’s room had the idea that as they’re walking away Burton would hit the button and turn the hot tub on so it'd really turn it into a stew. That was a lot of fun to write and shoot.

Do you have an affinity for those sorts of gory moments?
Not gore per se. I’m a big action junkie. I grew up on the '80s action movies—the bad ones and the good ones. I was around for the rebirth of the action movie. I credit Die Hard and the second Rambo movie with separately reinventing the action genre, but prior to that I’d been raised on Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris and all that stuff. And I love all the good ones, the really successful ones, and also the ones that went straight to cable and video that I used to watch late at night with Dolph Lundgren, Jeff Speakman, and Steven Seagal. There’s a place for all of that and we pay tribute to all of that, as well as the more highbrow stuff, as we go through our seasons.

Banshee has a diverse cast with actors from all over the globe. How does that affect the show?
I loved that when we were casting the show it was like the wild west. We ended up with a cast that no no broadcast network would ever approve. There’s this otherness to Banshee and by casting such a wide ranging group of people of different nationalities and races it enhances that otherness, the idea that this a town that's like every town, but it’s like no town you’ve ever seen. And all the characters are memorable and unpredictable. When you watch shows on USA, you almost feel like you could lift the guys from this show, put them in that show. Our characters wouldn’t necessarily fit into any other show, and I like that.

Is there any possible way to make Lucas more badass than he already is?
We tow a line with him because at the same time we want to make him extremely sympathetic, and the fact is he’s struggling, he’s suffering, and peace is so elusive for him. You don’t want to make him so badass that you stop feeling his suffering. So I’m sure we’ll find ways to continue to hurt him. [Laughs.] He’s almost Shakespearean in his tragic existence. There is no happy ending for this guy.

Interview by Justin Monroe (@40yardsplash)

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