Back from the dead:
Absentia, a new thriller streaming on Neon this week, looks at the mysterious return of an FBI agent six years after she was kidnapped and presumed dead.
Homeland theme to new Neon drama.
How would you feel if the partner you thought had been abducted and later declared dead in the absence of a body, suddenly turned up again after suffering horrific torture and abuse?
That is the core storyline of Absentia, an eerie thriller streaming on Neon, starring Stana Katic (Castle’s Kate Beckett) and Patrick Heusinger, the bad guy who played opposite Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.
Katic (above) plays Emily Byrne, an FBI agent who was kidnapped six years before Absentia’s story starts.
In the meantime, her husband Nick Durand (Heusinger) finally gave up hope and remarried, with his new wife becoming stepmother to the son he had with Byrne.
That is some serious stuff to deal with and Heusinger acknowledges that his character is damaged goods.
“He’s somebody who has had a lot of psychological trauma. The beginning of my exploration started with understanding psychologically what it means to be traumatised that way, to lose somebody, to think, ‘She’s dead, she’s completely gone’,” he says.
“It’s a fun question for an actor to get to ask themselves – what would you do? What would you do if somebody you love disappeared? How long would you look for them?
“And then what would it mean if you have somebody close to you
that you’ve actually lost – suddenly they were back and in your life? And what does that do to you? That’s another form of trauma that he has to deal with.”
Heusinger describes Nick’s new wife Alice, Cara Theobold, as his “saviour”. He says the scriptwriters didn’t fall into the trap of making Alice somebody viewers dislike and they can’t wait for Emily and Nick to get back together.
“This script leaned into the character of Alice and made her incredibly three-dimensional, made our love very powerful and very real, made her a very successful mother to this child that wasn’t hers, that she effectively adopted, and that is one of the great things I think that speaks to the quality of this show,” he says.
So will Emily and Nick get back together? Will he have to choose between them?
“I like the door being open. I want to change your words a little bit. You said I’m choosing, but maybe they choose me. You know what I mean? It’s their choice if they want to be with me or not, as well, and I think all three of us will be navigating those waters.”
Katic’s character is a complex one. Not only has Emily Byrne been abused, she is now a suspect in murders that happened during the past three years she was missing.
Before she disappeared she was investigating a string of serial killings in which a wealthy banker was the prime suspect. He was later jailed for her murder, only to be released when she reappears, but with no knowledge of the missing years apart from the abuse and torture she suffered.
“When our story starts, she comes back from the dead and we discover that she had been tortured for six years, and she’s starting life anew,” says Katic.
“A lot of her world in the past has completely changed. Her husband is now married. Her child is grown up, calling someone else mom. Her father is not in his full health.
“She is a survivor. And to be a survivor, I feel like you have to be a fighter and I love that about this character because she has undergone something so extreme, and to be able to pull through that in spite of everything that’s trying to grab at her along the way, she’s just pushing right through it all.
“And now we have a female warrior who also is a mother, who also is a sister, who also was a wife. And so we get to see all of the other layers that create a strong kind of female protagonist.”