‘Leverage: Redemption’: How Much Will We See of Hardison in the Second Half?

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the first eight episodes of Leverage: Redemption.]

The old crew is (mostly) back in the IMDb TV revival of Leverage, but due to Aldis Hodge’s limited availability, hacker Alec Hardison is only with the others for two episodes.

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“Believe me, and I think he’ll tell you the same thing, he wants to do this show as much as he absolutely can, and we want him,” executive producer Dean Devlin tells TV Insider of crafting Hardison’s storyline around Hodge’s schedule. “It’s such a gift to get him. He’s blown up into such a tremendous actor. All of the movie work he’s done was Oscar-worthy and now he’s got this giant role in a huge DC comics movie [Black Adam]. His whole career has been blowing up and the fact that he wants to keep coming home and doing these with us is a real tribute to his love of the character. And we’re grateful for every second of screen time we get with him.”

In his limited appearances in the first half of Redemption, we learned that while Leverage International is thriving, hitter Eliot Spencer (Christian Kane) and thief Parker (Beth Riesgraf) were handling most of the traveling. Hardison, meanwhile, was staying home, working on other projects like, “working with refugee groups, coordinating food drops for resettlement camps, getting medicine to aid workers,” he explained to grifter Sophie Devereaux (Gina Bellman). “George Clooney’s satellite that tracks all the war crimes? It’s all software. Somebody’s gotta run it.”

And more projects came up that required his help, to the point that in the second episode, Eliot pointed out, “in our line of work, you’re one of the best. But in that line of work, you’re the only one, man. It’s OK to grow up, realize you’re not the person you used to be.” The hitter knew that his friend made “the right call, for now,” when Hardison decided to take a step back and focus on his other work (and let his sister, Aleyse Shannon’s Breanna Casey, step in) by the end of “The Panamanian Monkey Job.”

As for how much we’ll see of Hardison in the second half (which drops this fall), that remains a surprise. “I cannot confirm nor deny” his character will pop up in more than one episode, Hodge says, only teasing that the second half is “going to be fantastic, leads up to a great season finale and you will not be disappointed.”

Alfonso Bresciani/Amazon Studios

Devlin echoes his vague sentiment: “I want to let the audience discover what they get and what they don’t get, but I think the thing is his presence is always felt on the show and that’s why it was so important for us when we brought in the Breanna character that she was his step-sister because it keeps these connections going to him and keeps his character alive, even when he couldn’t be on episodes.”

Unfortunately, Hodge’s limited availability likely affected the chances of getting an episode reminiscent of “The Rundown Job.” (In the original run’s last season, Parker, Hardison, and Eliot worked a job alone, giving us a taste of what could have come next after Sophie and Timothy Hutton’s Nate left them to continue their work in the finale.)

“Unfortunately, [we’re not getting one] this season,  but when they put the three of us together, it’s always just been magic,” Kane says. “Aldis is busy literally flying around the earth right now with wearing a pair of wings playing Hawkman, so we had to pick and choose our times to when he came in. [He’s] such a strong, strong part of this for me, my rock. Eliot feeds off of Hardison.”

Alfonso Bresciani/Amazon Studios

“When we were allowed to have him on set, we used him as much as we can get, and everybody wanted to work with him. It would’ve been fun to do that again, but I know I can speak for Gina and Noah [Wyle, who plays fixer Harry Wilson]. They wanted to be a part of it too,” he continues. “So when you get Aldis Hodge in the room, everybody wants to be around him and everybody wants to be in the scene. So we’re looking forward to that again, because [“The Rundown Job”] was one of my all-time favorite episodes. But unfortunately, it won’t happen this year because he’s off saving the world with The Rock.”

That fits, since Hardison is off helping save the world on Leverage: Redemption. “He’s taken on the role of being the brains of the machine. So he’s got to go to country after country and handle this operation that he helped to build,” Hodge says. And after the five years we saw of him with the crew in the original series, “we saw Hardison became aware of his true purpose. And then he grew into his true purpose and what we saw with Eliot, Parker, and Hardison going off to do Leverage International was Hardison also running towards his purpose.”

Leverage: Redemption, Part 1, Streaming Now, IMDb TV