“There Are So Many Ways to Go With It”

This interview contains spoilers for The Last Frontier Season 1 finale.

Haley Bennett is a truly versatile talent. Though The Last Frontier marks her first television role, she has had an impressive film career, kicking off with musical rom-com Music and Lyrics and including everything from action classics like The Equalizer to critically acclaimed historical dramas such as Till. Her most well-known performance, however, is arguably the psychological thriller film Swallow, which sees her as an unsatisfied woman who begins to consume inedible objects and won her the Best Actress Award at the Tribeca Film Festival. Dominic Cooper’s range is just as impressive, spanning Marvel to Mamma Mia! to My Lady Jane. His most famous turn, however, just might be Jesse Custer in AMC’s Preacher.

The two of them are electric together in the Apple TV crime drama. Bennett takes on the role of CIA agent Sidney Scofield, who must expertly juggle earning the trust of old-school Alaskan marshal Frank Remnick (Jason Clarke), answering to her cutthroat boss Jac Bradford (Alfre Woodard), and dealing with her complex feelings for the criminal she’s meant to be tracking down, who also happens to be her husband, Levi Hartman, aka Havlock. Cooper plays Havlock to perfection, as he always seems to be one step ahead. Though he’s no doubt a dangerous wildcard, there’s something charming about him, too, making it difficult not to root for him.

Collider got the chance to speak to Bennett and Cooper about Season 1. During the conversation, the two share the keys to understanding their layered characters, break down the action-packed finale, and reveal their hopes for a potential Season 2.

Haley Bennett and Dominic Cooper Reveal the Keys to Unlocking Their Complex ‘Last Frontier’ Characters

“He’s a Navy SEAL, he’s a mathematician, he’s a lecturer — he’s all these things.”

COLLIDER: First of all, congratulations on the show. I was seriously blown away by both of your performances. I want to start with you, Haley, because I absolutely love the fact that Sidney carries around that soda bottle filled with alcohol in a couple of scenes. I feel like it tells us so much about her character. What was the quirk or element for you that felt like the key to unlocking her?

HALEY BENNETT: It reminds me, I once worked with an actor who carried around a Sprite bottle with liquor in it.

DOMINIC COOPER: Did you really? Can I guess the name?

BENNETT: Yeah.

COOPER: No.

BENNETT: Okay. [Laughs] Also, the music is really part of the DNA of the show. In the script, there would be side notes from Jon Bokenkamp of the different songs that would be playing for different parts at different times, so those were little nuggets — audiovisual nuggets — that would cue me into Sidney. But she is a character who’s defined by her secrets and who has to make a lot of morally ambiguous decisions to uncover the truth. And then, she is sent to Alaska, and she encounters this crisis, and she meets Frank Remnick, who is like a foil to her. They are polar opposites, or seem to be polar opposites, but as the series continues, you realize that they are a lot more similar than they are different. I think they realize that they need each other more than they think they do.

There’s the physical aspect of the show, and what I love about this was there wasn’t a lack of this real emotion and authenticity and human behavior, human dynamics. These Mission Impossible movies, they’re these incredible summer blockbusters, but they don’t always have the same kind of substance, and I really think that, as the season continues, audiences will really grow to care about the characters and what they’re going through.

I also feel like it doesn’t have a lack of plot twists. I was always on the edge of my seat, getting turned all around, and I feel like that starts from the very beginning, where Havlock is revealed to be impersonating this pilot. Dominic, how did you approach playing that, especially right at the beginning of the show like that?

COOPER: I think it was the first week that I had to play the marshall. There were interesting conversations about what levels to perform — you need to be convincing to that point, but also the surprise. I was constantly in a state of, “How much do I reveal? Should I be good at hiding? How good should Havlock be at acting?” So that is an interesting concept in itself. He’s a Navy SEAL, he’s a mathematician, he’s a lecturer — he’s all these things, but is he a good actor as well? He’s blindfolded, and he has to perform. Now, it’s a life and death situation, and we are not aware as an audience at that point, which is such clever storytelling and writing, because you find out when his wife’s life is at threat. You suddenly think, “Oh my goodness, his wife is in the hands of a maniac. He’s the psychopath in the hospital bed.” My job was then to be…because I never saw him as that — I always liked him.

BENNETT: You know where the character is going.

COOPER: Exactly. But it’s been interesting that people think he’s a psychopath.

BENNETT: But if you see only the first couple of episodes, you’re like, ‘Hm…”

COOPER: Yeah. That was what was always so challenging and interesting for me — to constantly have a dialogue with Jon and the directors about what level at what point. I just thought, “This guy’s great — he’s doing it for the greater good,” but actually, you’ve gotta be careful, because how you say something or perform something, you’ve gotta think, “These guys think you’re a psychopath at the moment. They think you’re gonna kill this person. You’re in a basement recording it — we don’t know what you’re about.” That was a really interesting kind of constant dilemma that I was navigating, and I thought that that was really enjoyable. And just as Hayley said, you had that, and then you had complex emotion, and you had really well-structured, written monologues at times, and then you had kick…you can’t say kick-arse, because it sounds so silly in English.

BENNETT: Kick-butt.

COOPER: Kick-ass action sequences, which were such good fun to be part of, and so inspired, and different, and by a director who, in my opinion, has made some of the best fight sequences in the last 10 years with Extraction. I was blown away by them. When I knew I was working with them, I watched it, and I thought that they were momentous. And his brother, he’s momentous. His brother Sam [Hargrave] does direct, and then, when Sam’s gonna go on overtime and they need to do some coverage to go back to fight scenes, Dan, his equally as talented brother, takes over. It’s a combination made in heaven.

Haley Bennett and Dominic Cooper on Selling ‘The Last Frontier’s Intense Language and Action

“We were fried but happy.”

You mentioned those monologues, which are so powerful and effective, but I can imagine there were some challenges with that, especially with the scientific dialogue that you guys are having to keep in your brains.

BENNETT: Yeah, absolutely. That was, for me, the most challenging aspect of the show — the fact that I come from a very blue-collar place in America and didn’t relate to this kind of Latin-derived, multi-sound, multi-syllable sentences. It’s like five multi-syllable words in one sentence, and I’m like, “I’m just a simpleton. I don’t know how to perform this.”

COOPER: That’s not true.

BENNETT: I was really overwhelmed by that, and also, there’s not a lot of time. There’s so much to do, especially with action. If you’re used to speaking in an Anglo-Saxon way, these long monologues, it’s a special skill. So after I made this series, I felt like, “Okay, I could do anything. I could be on The Pitt, or I could play someone medical. Government, doctors, lawyers — they are trained. They go to school to speak this way.”

COOPER: They do public speaking.

BENNETT: They do public speaking. I don’t have an education beyond high school, barely.

COOPER: You made it look really easy.

BENNETT: For me, that was so hard.

COOPER: What was the one thing that you didn’t get? It was so funny. And they gave you…I can’t say this on air or whatever we’re on, because it’s so rude. Something job…

BENNETT: Oh, cover job! Cover job.

COOPER: Cover job! And you got the information wrong. You got the hard words really easily. Cover job, you couldn’t say. And it went on for two hours. I felt so sorry for you.

BENNETT: It went on for like a half hour, but yeah. I really struggled with the language.

You sold it!

COOPER: You sold it so well. I watched it, and you’re so brilliant in it. I thought you had completely mastered…

BENNETT: My fear of multi-syllabic Latin words.

COOPER: You’re great.

You also really sold the action. I want to talk a little bit about the finale and what I want to call the Lion King moment, where Levi saves Sidney from falling off that bridge. What was it like shooting that moment, and what do you think was going through your characters’ minds?

COOPER: Oh my goodness!

BENNETT: Simba!

COOPER: I remember that was one of the last things we shot together, by which point we were fried but happy.

BENNETT: So fried.

COOPER: Fried But Happy is quite a good name of a shop.

BENNETT: The sequence on the dam.

COOPER: Sequence on the Dam is also a nice title.

BENNETT: That’s our spin-off show.

COOPER: Sequence on the Dam is good.

BENNETT: Damn secrets.

COOPER: I’ll tell you about the dam. We were meant to be on a real dam. We thought we were gonna be on a real dam. Problems with dams are, they’re damn dangerous, and damn dangerous dams mean that damn film companies can’t damn well damn work on them.

BENNETT: Insure them.

COOPER: Yeah, because it’s really dangerous, only six of them could be there, and it was a nightmare, so they built the dam. This is what’s great about working for Apple TV — they go, “Hey, this is too dangerous. Let’s build a dam. Damn you, we’ll build a dam.” And so a dam was built, damn it. And our last scene together was hanging off at the edge of a dam, but with a blue screen, and we were laughing a lot by then. It was wonderful, because we knew who we were — we knew our characters really well — and we were clasping on for dear life.

BENNETT: It was second nature. Simba, save me.

COOPER: Simba. What’s the song?

BENNETT: Who saved Simba?

Simba saved himself? All I know is they didn’t save Mufasa — that’s all I remember.

COOPER: Mystery solved. I haven’t seen it for a while. [Looks at PR rep] We’re talking about Lion King. I get blamed for going off subject.

That’s okay.

COOPER: I get blamed. This has nothing to do with me. We’re in trouble. I’m in trouble always.

Haley Bennett and Dominic Cooper Share Their Hopes for ‘The Last Frontier’ Season 2

“There are so many ways to go with it.”

I also wanna ask, because the show also ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, with Levi obviously telling Frank that he and his corner of the world are now at the center of everything, and then we have Sidney smiling in the back of this van. What do you two think could sort of happen if we were lucky enough to get a Season 2?

COOPER: Well, I know what should happen.

BENNETT: There are so many ways to go with it.

COOPER: I think it should be the before — we’d go back in time.

BENNETT: Prequel.

COOPER: It’s a prequel. You learn about the haves and the Havlocks and how they know each other — how they really know each other — and what that was like, and how they became who they became, and it should lead up to the crash. And then we should join it again.

BENNETT: Another plane crash?

COOPER: No, the plane crash. You see what I’m saying? And then we end with their past, and obviously, it runs simultaneously with Chicago. Sweet home Chicago.

BENNETT: The musical?

COOPER: No, where Frank’s from. What did Frank get up to in Chicago, and what we’re doing — plane crash. Pitch, pitch.

BENNETT: You’ll have to ask Jason that question. Jason’s a producer, so he’ll know more about it.

COOPER: We’re undercover producers.

BENNETT: We’re just pawns in the game.

COOPER: We shall be producers.

We’ll manifest that. That does lead into another question that I had, which is, I do love that we get an entire flashback, where we do see a little bit of their past and their background. Was it liberating to have that space to explore that? Or did it feel like a lot of pressure to finally have the truth come out in that way?

BENNETT: I think we were just excited to have more to explore and to work on. It felt like a different show. It felt like a different world — a completely different flavor. It was a nice breather from the Alaska world and a great escape from Alaska.

COOPER: I like Alaska, though.

BENNETT: I like Alaska.

COOPER: It informed what we were doing, so it came at helpful moments. There was a point when we were gonna do it all at the end. I was demanding a different haircut in the end — not because of that reason — but I thought it’d be quite interesting for us to visually look different. In fact, didn’t we both want to?

BENNETT: I think I did.

COOPER: You did as well. And someone said, “Don’t be ridiculous — we can’t film this.”

BENNETT: “We don’t have time.”

COOPER: We didn’t have time, but we were going to. It actually worked in our favor because, as we were making it, it informed the latter stages. It was so nice — suddenly, we were in a Parisian cafe. We were in a Parisian cafe, and we were understanding who we were. It was so beautiful to find out who they were when they were in love — how they fell in love. They’re a beautiful couple, and that’s a kind of brilliant reflection of marriage or a relationship that goes on and on. She dangles a key and is about to kill him — that’s how we’re intro’d. She’s ready to let him go, but then you see she’s vulnerable, and she’s scared.

BENNETT: Little bit of a Mr. & Mrs. Smith aspect to it. Espionage, and mystery, and love, and romance.

COOPER: Yes. So with the prequel, you’ll learn more.

The Last Frontier is streaming on Apple TV.

Watch on Apple TV