Shanola Hampton is now in her anti-hero era in the second season of NBC’s Found.
Spoilers for Episode 1 of Found Season 2 below:
Hampton’s renegade public relations specialist Gabi Mosely goes to no end to find victims of kidnapping, but the trust Gabi has established within her team and law enforcement is suddenly erased when everyone finds out Gabi has had her former kidnapper Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) in her basement.
Now Sir is loose, Lacey (Gabrielle Walsh) is missing, and Gabi must find him and try to re-establish the trust she lost.
Gabi is in the hot seat at the top of Found Season 2
In the first season, Hampton’s character Gabi is the heroine of the story, but no one knew she was hiding Sir in her basement. Now that the secret is out, in the first episode of Season 2, Gabi is facing the consequences of her actions. Hampton said that it has been “beautiful” to play a character who must now dig herself out of the anti-hero hole she’s dug for herself. She actress spoke to us about the situation the show sets up of putting its protagonist through the ringer and being subject to crticism from the other characters.
“It’s so beautiful to be able to play a beautifully flawed character with layers because, a lot of times, if you’re in that protagonist position…everything has to be perfect or you have to be looked upon and adored–whatever those things are that goes along with being a lead on anything, and to have it be questionable [of] Gabi’s, heroism, [is interesting] right?” she said to Blavity’s Shadow and Act.
“To have her be in a position where she is fighting for respect again, and having to ask for forgiveness, it’s so fun for me, and it’s so real in the sense that anyone that you look up to is still human being, and it speaks to the fact that the mind is a fragile thing,” she continued. “And you don’t know what you can go through that will make you have what I call the ‘over the edge moment’ where you just do something so out of character, but that can’t define who you are as a person. Your worst sin shouldn’t define who you are. And so it’s been great to play, and also it was really, really difficult because [for a lot of episodes] it’s like, ‘All right, folks, can we forgive Gabi now?’”
She also said that Gabi’s team will have a lot to parse through regarding their broken trust in their leader.
“It is a shock that everything they thought about Gabi feels like a lie to them, right? And so [you get to] see them rebuild in a new way, because it can never be the same. This major thing that’s happened is a process that the audience gets to experience as the characters are experiencing them and I think that’s what makes it fun and that’s what’s really cool about us,” she said. “Being able to have the luxury of episodes to tell the story and not being rushed into six, seven, eight episodes to tie it up to be able to draw it out and heal as humans heal [is great].”
The moment between Gabi and Lacey’s mother
Though her team is going at her, Gabi has a moment of reprieve when Lacey’s mother, Gina (Dionne Gipson) says she doesn’t fault Gabi for what has happened and completely understands.
“Even when I read it was like, “Oh, what a relief,’” said Hampton. “And it’s someone who knows her to her core that she respects that was a mother figure to her when she was just really like an orphan baby by the time she got back. To have that I think is exactly the security that Gabi needed at that time and needs throughout because everybody else has kind of turned their back. But it’s one of those things like a mother’s love. No judgment….nothing that you can do can make me love you more or less. And she treats Gabi that way and that’s really, it’s so beautiful for Gabby to have that.”
The show’s format shifts a bit
Though Hampton says she has full trust in the writers’ room and showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll, she did immediately have some questions now that the show was shifting to Sir being on the run and not in the basement assisting Gabi with cases.
“I was like, ‘What’s this going to be like?’ We set up a lovely little thing where he’s in the basement and I couldn’t believe that we were so quickly going to have him already have escaped,” she said. “In TV terms, Sir, could be in the basement this whole other second season and it still would play. It really could. But to take the risk of now he’s out … I didn’t know what it was going to be like, but I do know it changes because the formula is different. She’s not going to Sir, but it changes in a way that keeps your heart racing totally differently because you don’t know when he’s going to pop back up. You don’t know when they’re going to interact again. He’s just always looming around and so it makes the audience be like, ‘What is this crazy man doing?’”
She said that while Sir is a dangerous guy, he also has points to his personality that make you feel for him. As she said, viewers might “also some have empathy for him because he’s so broken.” But she also wants to make it clear that Gabi can also do her job without Sir.
“All of those [elements] play out in Season 2. I think we’ve successfully been able to make the the audience will ultimately decide,” she continued. “Even at the core, [with] Gabi Mosely having to really dig into herself, she’s smart enough to solve those cases. The whole point of Sir was, ‘You [Sir] are a mental case. So you can get in ahead of a mental case faster than I can, right?’ And so you’ll get to see her process without Sir but also the process of her dealing with not having anyone to bounce ideas off.”
Found Season 2 airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on NBC.
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