Lioness just changed the trajectory of the show with a shocking abduction in the season 3 premiere.
During the Sunday, August 2, episode of the hit Paramount+ series, Joe (Zoe Saldaña) was kidnapped after a past attempt six months prior went unsuccessful. This introduced a shakeup for the show, as the remaining nine episodes will follow Joe’s team as they try to find her — and bring her back alive.
“Anytime that you bring anything closer to home, it ramps the stakes,” Michael Kelly (Byron Westfield) exclusively told Us. “You have one of your own in that sort of situation.”
Kelly, 57, noted that the ramifications would be huge, adding, “It can’t help but to just make everything, the tension, the action, the excitement. It’s already an edge-of-your-seat kind of show. I think when you add that element to it, people are going to freak out.”
Created by Taylor Sheridan, Lioness is a spy thriller that follows the leader of a CIA team who enlists female operatives — known as Lionesses — to go undercover in the war on terror.
The season 3 premiere pivoted away from introducing a new Lioness into the fold. Instead, the team will focus on their mission with Joe as a dual timeline plays out the rest of the season.
Zoe Saldana and Nicole Kidman in Lioness season 3. Paramount+
“It just becomes so personal. Now it’s their boss,” Laysla De Oliveira (Cruz) teased to Us. “It’s somebody that they care about.”
Jill Wagner (Bobby) agreed during the joint interview, adding, “It gets very very personal. When you get that close to one of your own, then it gets a lot more focused and fierce. I think the team is activated in a way that they’ve never been activated.”
Ahead of the show’s return, Us also got Thad Luckinbill to weigh in on how Joe’s absence affects his character, Kyle McManus: “There’s such a connection between those two — whether it’s siblings or more — but there is a direct connection. So it becomes personal for Kyle more so because he’s all about his job.”
He continued: “Kyle is this guy that his goal at the end of the day when he wakes up and goes to bed is to fulfill his duty. But when it comes to Joe, that’s the first time I think you’ve seen the personal relationship there. It means more. It means more to Kyle to get this job done. He’s still Kyle. He’s still going to do it that way. But I love that he wrote that this year.”
Jonah Wharton (Tex), meanwhile, teased the foreshadowing.
“What’s great about this show is we got all this geopolitical stuff going on in the world and that’s the stage,” he noted. “But when you’re in it and when you’re a team, you just care about the man or woman next to you and your leader. That shows it’s a team that cares about each other, and we’ll go to the end of the world and do whatever we got to do to rescue one of ours.”
Lioness airs new episodes Sundays on Paramount+.
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