Your Watchlist
Including a new series of action drama Hanna
IN THE FIRST season of Amazon Prime Video’s Hanna, the 15-year-old protagonist learnt the shocking truth about her origins in UTRAX – a secret CIA operation where
DNA enhancements were added to embryos to create a brigade of super-soldiers.
Hanna (Esmé Creed-miles) eventually broke into UTRAX to free the other trainees – but only convinced one subject, Clara (Yasmin Monet Prince), to leave with her.
As the series resumes, Hanna and Clara are living off-grid in the forests of Romania, but UTRAX overseer John Carmichael (Dermot Mulroney) is determined to bring Clara back into the fold. To make that happen, he strikes a deal with his former student Marissa (Mireille Enos), who is privately working to help Hanna…
‘I don’t think it takes too long to figure out that Carmichael doesn’t have Hanna’s best interests at heart,’ says Mulroney. ‘He’s seeing a much broader picture than Hanna, because UTRAX is his brainchild, and Hanna is an anomaly. Her emergence is a fascination for him, but it’s also a liability.’
ENIGMATIC
The role of Carmichael, a new addition for the show’s second season, was an instant draw for Mulroney – even though he didn’t know what his character’s arc would be.
‘I knew it was a top-shelf show and a great job to have, so there was no question that I would do it,’ he says. ‘When I first heard of this part, I think I was only looking at one script, so it’s one of those jobs where my knowledge of the character was developing through the course of shooting.
‘I knew the outline, and I knew the content of the first couple of episodes, but I also knew that I was in great hands with [writer] David Farr, who was cooking up a hell of a spy yarn.’
While Carmichael cuts an enigmatic figure on screen, Mulroney found that his own upbringing in Alexandria, Virginia – just across the river from Washington DC (home to the Pentagon) – was very useful in fleshing out his character’s backstory.
‘There were people who worked for the government, fathers of friends and so forth, but you didn’t quite know what they really did,’ recalls Mulroney, 56.
‘They always said they worked for the State Department – but the other parents were kind of putting that in air quotes! So I think I knew CIA people, but I can’t say for sure.
But I could see that mentality of John Carmichael carrying on as normal in his suburban house, and yet being a puppet master to violence in the world.’