‘Leverage: Redemption’ Boss on Eliot’s Redemption, Sophie’s Love Life & More

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for all of Leverage: Redemption Season 2.]

As Leverage: Redemption has proven, there are still plenty of stories to tell with this crew of bad guys who are the best good guys.

The second season saw grifter Sophie (Gina Bellman) face her past and let go of her guilt, while hitter Eliot (Christian Kane) doesn’t think he’ll ever be redeemed. Harry (Noah Wyle) has accepted that he’s staying with the crew, after thief Parker (Beth Riesgraf) turned down a job offer for him. And they’re even going to be getting Hardison (Aldis Hodge) back… after they steal him from the space station, that is.

Executive producer Dean Devlin discusses key moments from Season 2 and what could be ahead if the series is renewed.

Eliot thinks he’ll never be redeemed. Is that something we could see explored in a significant way in a Season 3?

Dean Devlin: Absolutely. That’s kind of the fun of the new version of the show, to see how the work can affect each one of them. Season 1 was clearly about Harry’s redemption and Season 2 was Sophie’s. Everybody is gonna get their moments. It was really gratifying to see how much the fans reacted to getting more backstory. You never know when you do that, is that gonna work? But people seem to really like it this year. So I think going forward, we’re gonna do that balance of new stories versus backstories.

What would it take for Eliot to change his mind about that feeling? Is there anything that could at this point?

I think something incredibly unexpected would have to happen to him, but I think if Christian were sitting here, he would tell you that it’s impossible because he’s done things that are so bad that he can’t even speak about them.

I remember when he said the worst thing he’s done was for Damien Moreau (Goran Visnjic) and told Parker not to ask what it was [in Leverage Season 3].

I actually was on set that day and that little exchange was semi-improv on the set where he said, “don’t ask me because if you ask me, I’m gonna have to tell you.” That hit me right in the feels.

Eliot Brasseaux/Amazon Freevee

Talk about having Sophie face her past like she did and letting go of that guilt. How long had you had this storyline planned? We did hear a bit about her past in the original series.

When we did the episode where we found out about the royalty in her past in the original series, we started talking about ways this could go. We hadn’t committed, but we played around with a lot of ideas on wanting to find out more about what was that whole part of her life like and why did she leave it? We talked a lot about how once she was in there with the royals and doing the things they do, to a con person, it’s literally the most boring thing to be at these parties and at these receptions. And so we imagined Sophie just going, I gotta get outta here. But the more we talked about and thought about what if there was a real deep emotional core that she had to escape from, that led to this finale.

What’s Sophie like moving forward as a result of letting go of that guilt?

I think she really gets freed up a bit. In Season 1, she was still really recovering from the loss of Nate. In Season 2, she had to really come to terms with this idea that there were consequences to her actions. Now that she’s lived through this, she’s got a new sense of herself. In the beginning of the season, she was still trying to get her feet around the idea that she’s now the mastermind. I feel like by the end, she’s way more comfortable in her new position.

Harry’s officially staying for good, right? What’s made him accept that part of himself?

I don’t know if he’s staying for good, but what he’s accepted is that this life is part of him now as much as the law is, so he’ll always be there for the team when they ask. But even when he does his own work now, he’s going to be incorporating what he’s learned with the team into it. He’s now reconciled he’s neither that saint that he had thought he was in his head or the villain that he woke up to thinking he was, that there’s a lot of shades, and his desire to help people exceeds the boundaries of the law.

When I spoke to Gina at the beginning of the season, she said Sophie could maybe be ready for love again next year. Could that happen? Could it be with Harry?

I don’t think it could be with Harry, only because that’s such a good friendship that she needs. But we actually talked about what would happen if she got back into the dating world. Before, they didn’t have Tinder and all this other stuff, and it’d be really fun to watch her try to navigate trying to have a love life again in a whole new reality. So yeah, we’d love to explore her moving on to the next phase of her life and what that looks like.

But can any of them have a relationship outside of the crew? Because we saw Eliot try, albeit with the completely wrong choice, and that didn’t work out.

That’s always the problem with this lifestyle. There are sacrifices they have to make. Before she consummated things with Nate in the original series, she had a boyfriend, but she was lying to him all the time and it didn’t work. So yeah, it’ll be a real interesting thing to explore.

Sam Lothridge/Amazon Freevee

What about Eliot’s love life? 

I don’t know. It’s one of those things where you always want to do something because he’s got this loneliness and you hope that he’s gonna find peace, but every time we start to do a relationship, it closes too many doors. So I really can’t tell you for sure. I think he’s got a lot of internal healing to do before he could be in a relationship, but what happened with his father this year really changed a lot for him. It’ll be interesting to see what the post-father friction Eliot is going to be like.

Yeah, you finally introduced his father and Keith David was so good in the role. What are the chances of seeing him again?

Oh, I hope so. I hope we come up with the right episode for him. First of all, from the very early series, we always talked about with Christian that Eliot’s father was Black. That was always a decision we had very, very early in the show. We even played it. There’s this one episode where these white supremacists are going after Hardison and Eliot in the forest in the original show.

“The Gone Fishin’ Job,” right?

That’s right. I was shooting all the second unit on it, and I remember talking to Christian. I said, “when these guys get all white supremacists on you, your reaction isn’t, you’re standing up for him. This is personal, this is deeply personal.” We talked about it out there, so that’s why he goes off. It’s not just because he loves Hardison, it’s like you’re talking about him.

So we always wanted to do it, but we were never sure who the right actor would be. And about a year before we shot the show, Christian and I were at the Saturn Awards and Keith came up to us, said he was a huge fan of the show and he’s like, “if there’s ever a role for me…” Christian and I looked at each other like, “oh yeah, there’s a great role.” [Laughs] The guy brings so much class, he’s such a professional, he’s so talented and just the subtle ways he imitated Christian, it was just beautiful.

And I liked seeing them fighting side by side. 

We threw a little Easter egg in there where the father says this line before he punches a guy that is a variation of a line Eliot said when he punched a guy in Season 1. It was fun to see which fans picked up on that and who didn’t.

Are there any lingering questions from the original series or these first two seasons of Redemption you’d like to answer in a third season?

There’s a thousand lingering questions, but that’s the fun of it and we don’t want to answer all of ’em too much because then you run out of mystery.

Of all these backstories we’ve explored, we’ve only touched the surface of Parker. There’s a lot I want to know about Parker that hasn’t come out yet. Again, post-Eliot’s problem with his father is gonna be real interesting. Aleyse [Shannon] playing Breanna, she’s such a joy. She’s so freaking talented that I think that we’re gonna see a real explosion of her character next year because the first one, she was timid. This year, she was really starting to feel her feet. Next year, she’s gonna be balls out and that’s gonna be fun to watch.

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Because of how Parker’s changed since the original series premiere, how would she handle her past coming up now?

She’s actually come full circle. If you look at where she was at the end of the original 77 episodes, she’d really evolved. But what [Beth and I] talked about [is] you know how when kids come home from college and just being around their parents, they suddenly become 13 again? When she gets reunited with Sophie, old Parker sneaks into new Parker. There’s this conflict. But we said what the biggest difference was is in the original show, she was embarrassed about what made her weird. Now, she wears it like a badge of honor. She has no reservations or self-doubt about herself. So I think it’ll be really interesting to see how she deals with things in her past or when things show up again because she has a lot more tools than she had before.

Because Breanna’s the youngest, it seems like she might have the easiest path away from the crew. How much is that going to be part of her story going forward?

I think that’s gonna be a big part of next season, assuming we have one. She has big, big decisions to make. Is the Leverage team really her future or does she have another path? I think she’s gonna have to try on some different clothes before she knows what she likes to wear the most.

Leverage: Redemption, Streaming Now, Amazon Freevee