The Hunting Party's Josh McKenzie Digs Into Shane's Secrets: "I Really Struggled to Justify..."
Plus, working with the criminal-of-the-week guest stars, who McKenzie calls "absolute weapons."
This story contains spoilers for The Hunting Party Season 1, Episode 7, "Mark Marsden."
Romance is officially dead in the latest The Hunting Party episode, “Mark Marsden."
Our ex-Pit escapee of the week being chased by Special Agent Rebecca "Bex" Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh), CIA agent Jacob Hassani (Patrick Sabongui), and Shane Florence (Josh McKenzie) is Mr. Mark Marsden (played by character actor Jesse Bradford) who is very much triggered by weddings.
In his "Pit" therapy, he was treated with exposure therapy — but it hasn't really helped. Unfortunately, his escape is enabled by Carol (Brooke Smith), who thinks she can fix him... and sadly, she is proved very wrong.
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In our latest NBC Insider post-mortem exclusive, actor Josh McKenzie joined us to talk about the show's incredible lineup of guest actors, how much he wanted to know about Shane's secrets this season, and what scared him about this week's revelations.
Josh McKenzie praises their guest actors as "absolute weapons"
A big perk for the regular cast of The Hunting Party is getting a constant rotation of excellent character actors coming to the show to embody their serial killer targets. For “Mark Marsden," it was a well-known actor of the 2000s, Jesse Bradford, who played memorable characters in Bring It On (2000), The West Wing, and Flags of Our Fathers (2006).
McKenzie told NBC Insider that their guest actors are not only great but "vital" to their series' success because they are core to the story and make the cast look good. "We can be sh--, but they justify our abilities and capabilities," he said with a laugh. "So thankfully, we've got absolute weapons every episode. Jesse is included in that."
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However, the actor admitted that someone else had to alert him to Bradford's heartthrob status for those who grew up on his projects.
"It was actually my partner who spotted [him], as I'm so blissfully ignorant to a lot of stuff," he said. "My girlfriend was like, 'That's the guy from Bring It On going around killing women!'"
Wrestling with Shane's actions and motives
Across the last few weeks, it's become clear that Shane's off-the-clock visits to his "dad" have not been on the up and up. In truth, he is not the son of the dementia patient and is confronted about that by the man's actual daughter at the end of this episode.
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McKenzie said that from the very start of the season, he spoke with showrunners J.J. Bailey and Jake Coburn about some of Shane's backstory, including this secret.
"For Shane, it was very important that I had answers that I knew about where he was coming from and what was motivating him," he said. "There are other kinds of situations where you don't really want to know because the story plays out, in and of itself. But with this, obviously, everything is retrospective so his trajectory is defined by things that I needed answers to."
The actor said he also appreciated the time to chew on his character's actions because he needed to wrap his head around the moral and ethical issues it implied about Shane.
"I remember reading that [arc] and going like, 'Oh, wow,' because my grandfather had dementia and Alzheimer's, and it was pretty horrible to see," McKenzie shared. "It was a very, very emotional time. Playing that as somebody pretending to be [related to someone with dementia], I really struggled to justify that. So, I chatted a lot to J.J. and Jake."
Having meticulously plotted out this reveal over several episodes, Bailey told NBC Insider that it was a relief to show new facets of Shane through his actions.
"To finally learn that this guy — who seems like he's just got it all together, is happy to help and the guy you can always count on — actually has some pretty good secrets, maybe bigger than anybody on the show, it was really fun to finally get to that part of the story. We had his storyline figured out very early," Bailey said.
New episodes of The Hunting Party air on Mondays at 10/9c on NBC and stream next day on Peacock.
