Inside the Brutal World of The Terminal List Season 2: Luke Hemsworth Breaks Down Jules Landry’s Demise
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Main Facts
Prime Video’s high-octane military thriller The Terminal List returned for its explosive second season, adapting former Navy SEAL-turned-author Jack Carr’s second bestselling novel, True Believer. The narrative plunges Navy SEAL Commander James Reece (played by Chris Pratt) deep into an international web of conspiracy and vengeance. To navigate this treacherous landscape, Reece must lean on trusted allies, including sniper Freddy Strain (Gabriel Luna) and former teammate Mo Farooq (Dar Salim).
However, the season’s most unpredictable wild card is Jules Landry, a character first introduced in the prequel series The Terminal List: Dark Wolf. Portrayed by Luke Hemsworth, Landry fully embraces a descent into corruption, setting him on a direct collision course with Reece. Following a tense confrontation, Reece manages to capture Landry and extract vital intelligence. Yet, as viewers witnessed in the harrowing sixth episode, Mo Farooq still had a deeply personal score to settle.
In a recent deep-dive interview, Luke Hemsworth opened up about the grueling physical and psychological demands of playing out Landry’s infamous torture and execution scene, the luxury of building a complex backstory through a prequel series, and the intricate technical choreography required to bring Jack Carr’s pages to life on screen.
Chronology of a Character’s Collapse: From Dark Wolf to True Believer
When Luke Hemsworth was initially approached to play Jules Landry for the television adaptation of True Believer, the character occupied a relatively minor footprint in the source material.
"Landry was a tiny part in the True Believer book," Hemsworth explains. "He’s in there for, I think, a chapter. Even when I was offered the role, I was like, ‘What is this character? He’s barely in it. He has this iconic end, which is fun. But what are we going to do?’"
Fortunately, executive producers and writers Jared Shaw, Max Adams, and David DiGilio sought to expand Landry into a fully realized, three-dimensional adversary worthy of matching wits and firepower with James Reece. For Hemsworth, the opportunity to first flesh out the character in The Terminal List: Dark Wolf served as an extraordinary acting luxury.
"Normally, that’s the backstory work that you have to do yourself," says Hemsworth. Instead of sketching out a hidden past in private, he had an entire season of television dedicated to laying the groundwork. "We had many, many discussions along the way about why this guy was doing the things that he was doing, where he’s come from, and how that informs what’s going on in the future."
Knowing the destination from day one allowed Hemsworth to orchestrate a methodical, season-long unraveling of his character’s psyche. Rather than playing a one-note villain, Hemsworth charted a distinct evolution of chaos. "I always knew that we were coming to that finale right from the beginning, so I was off the leash in terms of being able to fill in a lot of those blanks," he notes. As the narrative pushed toward Episode 6, Landry became increasingly unhinged and physically imposing, even as his internal psyche sustained irreversible damage.
Supporting Data: Authenticity as the North Star
From its inception, The Terminal List has prided itself on an uncompromising level of tactical realism. The franchise was born out of real-world frustrations voiced by military veterans.
"Chris Pratt was sitting with his buddy, Jared Shaw, who’s an ex-Navy SEAL, that was like, ‘It doesn’t happen like that,’" Hemsworth recalls. "And Chris was like, ‘Well, let’s do something where it does look like it’s real.’ Their guiding star [is] to be authentic for those people."
This commitment to authenticity heavily bled into the production of Episode 6—an hour of television dominated by Landry’s brutal captivity, interrogation, and psychological sparring matches. Rather than relying entirely on movie magic or comfortable staging, Hemsworth actively requested physical discomfort to ground his performance.
During early rehearsals, standard magnetic prop handcuffs were used, but they routinely fell off due to the actor’s physical positioning. Unhappy with the lack of stakes, Hemsworth pushed for realism:
"I was like, ‘This is distracting and it doesn’t feel like I’m actually under any threat at all. I really want to feel some semblance of what it’s like to be tortured and chained to the floor.’ And so, we got real handcuffs and chained me to the floor. I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t get into any comfortable positions."
The actor spent nearly a week immersed in these grueling conditions. When well-meaning crew members approached him between takes to ask if he was alright, Hemsworth politely declined the comfort. "I had to say, very specifically, ‘Please, no more people coming up and asking me if I’m okay. I’m not okay. I don’t want to be okay. I have to have some sort of experience of the threat of everything that’s going on and try to make it as real as possible.’"
Official Responses: Behind the Scenes of a Deadly "Date"
The culmination of Landry’s arc involves a twisted confrontation with Mo Farooq, played by Dar Salim. Salim playfully described their extended showdown in the holding cell as "a date between Landry and Mo Farooq that you’ll never forget."
Hemsworth echoes this sentiment, citing a deep off-screen friendship with Salim that made the punishing sequence manageable. Yet, the atmosphere on set remained heavily weighed down by the grim nature of the material.
Wearing prosthetic appliances designed to simulate severe trauma, Hemsworth observed how deeply the imagery affected those around him, even though everyone knew it was make-believe.
"I was like, ‘It’s not real, guys. I’m actually not naked,’ but everyone was very quiet and very respectful," Hemsworth notes, reflecting on the psychological weight of the set. "Even though it’s not real, people are still very uncomfortable being around that… When I was standing on that chair and there was piano wire and a noose, it still felt like it was me. It was like a fake limb, where I could still feel it. It was terrifying."
Despite the heavy atmosphere, Hemsworth infused Landry with an unsettling, sociopathic detachment. Even while facing certain doom, Landry refuses to break in the traditional sense, frequently flipping expectations on his captors. "At the start of his torture, Landry is clearly playing games with Reece… He’s definitely a sociopath. But I also think there’s a part of him that just doesn’t care. He really does not care until the very last moment, when it crashes down on him."
Implications and Technical Execution
Pulling off a high-stakes, violent sequence like Landry’s final episode requires a delicate balance between psychological immersion and strict technical precision. While Hemsworth leaned into the physical misery—insisting that the water used in the sequence remain genuinely cold rather than heated—the logistics of stunt work demanded absolute coordination.
The climax of Landry’s arc features a dramatic fall engineered by Mo Farooq, requiring exact timing to ensure blood rigs and camera angles hit their marks without putting the actors in real physical jeopardy.
"I was not actually attached, in any way, to the wire," Hemsworth reveals, praising his stunt double, Lee Villeneuve. "The big danger was falling and not being able to break your fall without anything other than your face. But I had a wonderful stunt guy actually do the fall, Lee Villeneuve, who is a martial artist and just incredible. He looked exactly like me."
This fusion of raw, unhinged performance art and precise stunt coordination is what ultimately gives The Terminal List its visceral edge. For Hemsworth, the challenge lay in straddling two entirely different mindsets simultaneously: completely surrendering to the chaotic terror of the moment while remaining hyper-aware of lighting, framing, dialogue, and safety.
"That is the skill," Hemsworth concludes, "being able to forget all of that stuff, but also not forget it."
The Terminal List Seasons 1 and 2 are currently available to stream globally on Prime Video.
