[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for the finale of The Hunting Party.]
Summary
- The NBC series ‘The Hunting Party’ follows Bex Henderson catching escaped killers from a secret government prison.
- The season finale raised questions while leaving lingering mysteries and asking new questions for a potential Season 2.
- Bex’s profiling skills, relationships with team members, and the ethical implications of Pit experiments are key points.
The NBC crime thriller The Hunting Party follows a small team of investigators led by former FBI profiler Bex Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh) as they track down and capture the most dangerous serial killers, all previously believed to be locked away forever or dead. But when a blast at the top-secret government prison known as the Pit, where experiments were also being done on this rare breed of dangerous individuals, sets them free and Bex is enlisted by her former FBI partner Oliver Odell (Nick Wechsler) to help recapture them as they’re located, it also forces them to address what pushed them apart in the past.
In the “Jenna Wells” episode, the team was on the hunt for the Killer Chemist, who enjoys taking down her unsuspecting victims by poisoning them. The season finale finally answered some questions, when it comes to the purpose of the Pit and what was really going on there, but it also raised some new questions that won’t be answered until a possible Season 2. And on top of that, it put two of the team members in jeopardy and brought some past feelings into the present.
During this one-on-one interview with Collider, Roxburgh talked about what made Jenna Wells a formidable foe, what Bex thinks of Colonel Eve Lazarus (Kari Matchett), why she’s drawn to profiling and had even considered doing it herself, how the finale puts the team in jeopardy, what she’s most interested in learning about in a second season, and whether there’s a plan for checking everybody’s feet now.
Jenna Wells Is a Formidable Foe for the Team in ‘The Hunting Party’ Finale
“Women are sneakier.”
Collider: We’re so conditioned to be aware of our surroundings around men that I thought it was particularly interesting to see how someone like Jenna Wells could slip under the radar of all these unsuspecting victims. Does that make her even scarier than some of the people that have been on the show up until now?
MELISSA ROXBURGH: Yeah. I think she’s equally as scary, but to your point, we view women as nurturing, kind and honest, most of the time. It’s men and women, but I think that women are sneakier, which we see with Eliza Coupe’s character, Jenna. She’s manipulative. She’s almost darker because of that. In that beginning scene where we think that the girl is being roofied by a man, and then no, just kidding, it’s Jenna, I guess you have to be wary of both sexes. When we’re raising our kids these days, tell them, “Don’t talk to the lady or the man.”
The finale is the first time that Bex really gets to have a chat with Lazarus, who is someone that clearly has had more details than anyone else, up to this point. What do you think Bex actually thinks of her?
ROXBURGH: She semi-trusts her. Obviously, she doesn’t know her that well. And they’ve really only had the one interaction, in person. Bex is no dummy. She’s going to keep her eyes open. But I think that there are a lot darker moments coming from Lazarus.
Related
JJ Bailey and Jake Coburn discuss the creation of ‘The Hunting Party.’
When this series came your way, what was the thing that originally hooked you and made you want to be a part of telling this story?
ROXBURGH: I just love profiling. I was a teen that really wanted to understand what body language meant, or why someone would say this a certain way or choose to do that. Understanding people’s psychology was always interesting to me, so I took a couple of courses for it at university. I wanted to go down that path, but I did not in the end. I just thought getting into the minds of the world’s worst serial killers would be so much fun.
Melissa Roxburgh Draws a Comparison Between ‘The Hunting Party’ and ‘Severance’
“It feels like they’re all doing this job, but at some point, they start questioning why.”
How much did you actually know about the bigger picture of this series? What did you know at the start of shooting this season and how much more do you feel you know now?
ROXBURGH: I went into this really not knowing much beyond the fact that she’s gonna be profiling serial killers and that there’s a secret government Pit. But where the writers took the Pit storyline is so exciting. I think it’s such a cool payoff in the end because you realize that it’s so much more than you thought, and it’s so much bigger than you thought, and it goes all the way up. Those are the question marks we’re being left with at the end of the season. How far up does it go? Are the good guys the good guys, or are they actually the bad guys?” It feels very Severance-y to me. It feels like they’re all doing this job, but at some point, they start questioning why they’re doing it and who they’re doing it for.
Because protecting Sam is such a big part of it for Bex, would you also like to see more of Bex as a mom?
ROXBURGH: Yeah. She hopes and prays that Sam is safe at college and just doing her studies, but I know that it’s not going to be that easy in Season 2. I would love to see more dynamics between the two of them. Part of why Bex is good at her job is that she’s nurturing and she’s a mom and she cares about her daughter back home. That’s why she’s doing a lot of this, so I think it’s important to bring her back.
There’s something familiar about a very rich man like James Whitmore, who creates something that he can then use to manipulate to get what he wants. How does Bex feel about the fact that these prisoners were experimented on in this way? These are horrible people, but should they have been treated in that way?
ROXBURGH: Yeah. Everyone on the team had a place within the system, and I think this show really takes them out of that to question their roles. Even Jacob Hassani, we see him struggling with just always following orders. And then Shane, he’s been the soldier, but even he struggles. All the characters are questioning their roles in the system. Bex is our moral compass of the show. What makes her so good at her job is that she wants to find the human in all of them. When she realizes how much they’ve been experimented on, I think it deeply disturbs her. I don’t think she’s at a point where she’s able to stop all of this, but it’s part of what keeps her going in this mystery and keeps her in this job. It’s not just re-collecting them but figuring out who’s doing all this.
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“There’s No Aliens”: Melissa Roxburgh Compares ‘The Hunting Party’ to ‘Manifest’
‘The Hunting Party’ airs on NBC on Mondays.
You weren’t in the scene when the room full of people fall to the ground, but you guys come into that. Was it just a room full of background actors lying on the floor? What was it like to shoot that?
ROXBURGH: That was a night shoot. We came in super late and everyone was sleeping on the floor in twisted positions. I was like, “Bless you guys. That must be very uncomfortable.” But they were all good sports about it. It was such a nice big scene. We hadn’t had a big scene to that level on the show yet. Coming into that was shocking.
Because this is such a high-stakes situation every week and you’re trying to capture these really bad people, I wasn’t surprised that one of the team gets taken down in some way. What was it like to learn that it would be Hassani and how hard was that for a Bex?
ROXBURGH: It wasn’t just Hassani. We have [Odell] as well. It’s the first time that we see real emotion from Bex. We had the scene where she tells Odell how she feels about him, but we’re not sure if that’s fake or not because she has to get the information off this phone. This is the first time that we know, without a doubt, that she really cares about Hassani, and at the beginning of the season, she did not trust him. So, it just shows how far the characters have come in learning to rely on each other and actually bonding. And I love Patrick [Sabongui], so seeing him hurt is just really sad. And then, by the time we get to the end of the episode, we’re not sure what’s going to happen with Odell. I hope he comes back.
’The Hunting Party’s Melissa Roxburgh Says Bex Hasn’t Even Had Time to Let Everything Sink In
“There’s just a vast sense overwhelm.”
In that moment, she’s confronted with her own feelings. What was it like for her to face that moment?
ROXBURGH: That was such a chaotic day of filming. I think that was hour 15, by the time we even got to that scene, so it almost resembled what they were going through as characters. They’d been rushing around. She barely got a chance to shower, and then she finds out Jenna’s going to the command center. She gets there, and then he gets poisoned, and there’s just a vast sense of overwhelm. That’s how she’s feeling. She doesn’t even have two seconds to process what’s happening, so it’s just a lot of confusion. It’s like when something bad happens, it takes a while for it to sink in.
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Wechsler also says that, while you will have some answers by the end of the season, there will be new questions that arise.
By the end of the finale, the characters all have little bit of information, but they don’t each know the bigger picture. Bex knows that Hassani’s wife has been dead for two years, the doctor knows that Shane’s mother was a graduate of the Pit, and Morales knows that Lazarus is Shane’s mother. What big questions are you most interested in learning the answers to in a possible second season?
ROXBURGH: I want to know how many Lazarus’ are out there. If she’s a graduate of the Pit, who else is a graduate of Pit? Are they working for the government or are they just wandering around on the streets living a normal life? Who are they and where are they? We’re catching the ones that were still being trained or being experimented on. But Lazarus went through the program, and she got out, and she’s got a job now, which is unheard of. So, I’m very interested to see where that goes.
Do you have to check everyone’s feet for barcodes now?
ROXBURGH: She’s just going to go to the beach where everyone’s wearing flip-flops and do a little scan.
- Release Date
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February 3, 2025
- Network
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NBC
- Directors
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Thor Freudenthal
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Melissa Roxburgh
Rebecca ‘Bex’ Henderson
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Patrick Sabongui
Ryan Hassani
The Hunting Party airs on NBC and is available to stream on Peacock. Check out the trailer:
