CABIN PRESSURE
Fasten your seatbelts! There’s turbulence ahead in the second season of TheFlightAttendant, writes Siobhan Duck
RUMOUR has it Kaley Cuoco wasn’t completely on board with doing a second season of The Flight Attendant. After all, how do you top a season that saw her breakout character, alcoholic flight attendant Cassie Bowden, embroiled in a high-stakes game of espionage after waking up from a boozy bender next to a dead body? But any fears the lead actor had about living up to the lofty expectations of the series’ fans were soon allayed when she saw what was in store for Cassie and her crew.
Alison Hurbert-Burns, host of Binge’s weekly TV podcast Skip Intro, says it’s unusual for a second season to take off from page to screen so quickly – a sign the writers “had a vision for this all the way through” and were prepared to continue the story.
“The Flight Attendant deserved a second season because it kind of broke the genre,” HurbertBurns explains.
“I watch a lot of TV and this show is really unique. It’s a dark comedy – and Kaley is so famous for her comedic chops, and you can really see how this show was built around her talent and adapted for her – but you don’t normally see that in female-led crime shows. There’s Killing Eve but… you could count them on one hand.”
This season begins with
Cassie loved-up and dried out in LA, where she’s living her best life with a sideline job as a jet-setting CIA operative.
When she inadvertently finds herself in the frame for a bombing in Berlin, she’s soon crossing continents, going toe-to-toe with hired assassins and facing the temptation of the mini-bar.
Cuoco’s co-star Griffin Matthews – who plays Shane Evans, a federal agent masquerading as an airline steward – says the cocktail of glamorous locations, John le Carré-style spy drama and dark humour made The Flight Attendant great escapism during Covid lockdowns. And with even more eye-catching international backdrops – not to mention superstar Sharon Stone – in season two, Matthews says it often felt more like filming a Hollywood blockbuster than a TV series. Plus, he explains, trying to shoot overseas in the middle of a pandemic made filming just as exciting and unpredictable as the material in the scripts.
“You feel the ‘ bigness’ – is that even a word?” he asks with a laugh. “It’s huge. Production is huge. Even going to Iceland, [which] I think was a last-minute change – we were supposed to go to Tokyo, and then the Tokyo Olympics were kind of a mess with Covid. So they had to reroute us to Iceland and re-jig that storyline. It felt like we were on a bit of a day-to- day roller-coaster just trying to get this season complete. But Iceland was epic.”
Matthews says strict Covid restrictions that were in place for the first shoot meant he didn’t get to know the entire cast until recently, when he was shocked to discover his castmate Deniz Akdeniz is an Aussie.
Melbourne-born Akdeniz says he had a ball with his character Max, the American hacker boyfriend of Cassie’s best friend, lawyer Ani Mouradian, played by Girls star Zosia Mamet.
“[Zosia] has one of the quickest wits out there,” he adds with a laugh. “If she were out in the Wild West, armed with [only] her wit, then bam! Every time, she’d be a killer. You want to keep on your toes because Kaley is the same. The two of them. And if you miss a beat, you’re not there in the [show]. You’re out.
“Like, you’ve just got to be able to keep up with that rhythm,” Akdeniz adds of the show’s dynamic. “And that’s just so fun. It’s like a dream to be able to come, to be challenged, to be to be a part of it. And it definitely keeps you on your toes.”
THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT
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