This second season of Prime Video’s Cross doesn’t leave room on the table for the morally gray.
A judge and a billionaire sit at the center of this installment of the show, showcasing two people with very different kinds of power. For Alex Cross (Aldis Hodge) and his team, everyone is a suspect, even the ones closest to them, as they work around the clock to take down the latest mass murderer.
The season’s villains
“Ben Watkins and his writing team have done an incredible job, three years ago, crafting this story. And as they were writing the story, it was almost as if they had a magic crystal ball because what they are portraying in this season is playing out right now on the streets of America,” Matthew Lillard, who joins the cast of Cross this season as billionaire Lance Durand, said to Blavity’s Shadow and Act.
“Not only in the billionaire class, but in terms of who is right and who is wrong, and what lengths do you go to make wrong right and right wrong,” he continued.
Jeanine Mason joins the cast as Rebecca, also known as Luz, a central, dark anti-hero driven by vengeance.
“How destabilizing it is when you feel as if you are not being protected by people who are expressly meant to be protecting you,” she said. “Luz, for sure, is obviously somebody who feels she’s been disregarded. Her people have been disregarded, and she’s just done. She’s like, ‘All right, then it’ll be me. It’ll be me to be the one to fix stuff.’ And granted, she takes it to an extreme, but we understand the frustration.”
Lillard added that what is being seen on the show mirrors the anti-ICE protesters taking to the streets of Minnesota.
“I think it’s gonna be very interesting for people to sit down — I think that’s why the show’s so incredibly alluring — you sit down, you see yourself reflected on television, and then you’re presented with this moral conundrum that I think people are really going to be turned on by.”
Entering the world of Alex Cross
This is the first time that the character Alex Cross from the beloved James Patterson novels has been the central figure in a television series.
Previously, the books were adapted for the 2012 film adaptation, Alex Cross.
“I love James Patterson, and I always remember hearing about Along Came a Spider, and I never actually read it,” Mason said. “I was familiar with the property, of course, and the book and the movies that predate the series. The first time I saw Aldis (Hodge) on the poster, I was like, ‘Oh, here we go.’ It’s electric. You feel it in the fan base. I was at a Starbucks the other day, and these two baristas were so lovely, and they were talking. They asked me about another show I’d been on, and they’re like, ‘What are you doing next?’ And then I said, ‘Do you know the show Cross?’ And they lost their mind. They’re such fans. It’s fun to be a part of a property that’s just taken off.”
Lillard concluded, “As an actor, you can’t do anything in terms of how you approach the work. The one thing you can do is respect those fan bases and appreciate their love and their fandom. You can’t put pressure on yourself to perform, but you certainly can show up and represent that fan base in the best way you can.”
The Cross finale airs on Wednesday on Prime Video.
The post ‘Cross’ Season 2 Stars Matthew Lillard And Jeanine Mason On Moral Ambiguity And Why They Love James Patterson appeared first on Blavity.
