For me, this was a great way to pop my cherry in television, because I’ve been with this crew as a family for five years. I’ve got something to offer actors and the storytellers. But after 25 years in the business, I’ve got something to offer. Of course, I love acting and will continue to do it. This has always been part of my master plan, which was to move into producing and directing. We have already got three films in the can, and we’re working on a television show that I’m going to shoot in Australia with a huge streamer attached. Thomas Jane: I started a production company called Renegade with my producing partner, Courtney Lauren Penn, and we hit the ground running. We talked to the director of the episode-none other than Thomas Jane (aka Miller) himself-about how the climactic scene came together, as well as, generally, what it was like to step behind the camera for an episode of The Expanse.ĭen of Geek: I am curious how this all came about? What made you want to direct an episode of The Expanse? This feels like the sort of thing that maybe you talked about for a while and it’s finally happening? The last of the three installments, “Mother,” ends with one of the stealth asteroids Marco Inaros launched at Earth at the end of Season 4 finally hitting the planet. While most of The Expanse Season 5 will be dropped on a weekly basis, we got the first three episodes of the all new season all in one go-and what a three episodes they are. Thomas was doing the scene on the day, and we were looking for a moment to encapsulate his whole character, so we threw that in on the last take or two.Warning: This The Expanse article contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 5, Episode 3. We wrote that line at the very last minute. But he says that line when he starts removing his gear, breathing in the protomolecule, and willfully infects himself. I hope a lot of people thought he’d convince her to stop Eros. The point of no return for me was when he tells protomolecule-infected Julie, “You made a guy like me believe in something.” You always expect the Roci crew to swoop in at the last moment, but not after that. The point wasn’t for him to walk out of it. He’s going into the great unknown to discover what his life was all about and finds Julie. Isolating Miller from the Roci crew and everyone else was the last push of him cutting the cord to the world. The more we sort of promised the audience that all would be well, the more surprising his last hurrah would be. We wanted to build to a point where you think, “Wow, he might not get out of this.” The energy of those kinds of stories just make you think all will be well. The audience had to presume that this is an action-packed episode, the Roci crew will fix things, Miller will get out, and somehow things will be resolved. We wanted to really make it into a thriller where there’s a relentless pace, in a narrative sense. His journey doesn’t really have the same meaning until you end it that way. It was important that we didn’t alter it from the books for the sake of the show. How did you approach Miller’s death and sacrifice to make sure it had the intended impact? Main character deaths are a big deal, but could be done cheaply. Miller finds a protomolecule-infected Julie Mao in the heart of Eros. For Miller, we talked a lot about the arcs of characters we love from movies like The Verdict and Dog Day Afternoon. It’s difficult for an actor to know what their arc really is until you know how it all lands, and you know about the end of that character. He got all the way through Leviathan Wakes in the early weeks of shooting the show, so he knew that’s where Miller would end up. How did you break it to Thomas Jane? Did he read the books? Plus, we just loved having Thomas Jane around, so we kept him as long as possible. To deliver it in a powerful and correct way, like my experience reading the books, was the most important thing. Miller’s story is such a culmination that it’s really the heart of this first chunk of the show. The end of this episode features the kinds of scenes that made me to want to make the show in the first place. But we realized we were racing too fast, and we figured it should go into Season 2 a bit. The crescendo of how Miller’s arc concludes and Julie coming back was all very much from Leviathan Wakes. We originally hoped to get through a book a season, so it was supposed to be our Season 1 finale. Was it always the plan to build to this revelation at the halfway point of Season 2?
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