Melissa Roxburgh stars in NBC’s latest procedural,The Hunting Party,as former FBI profiler Rebecca “Bex” Henderson, who left the bureau after a case she worked on with Oliver Odell (Nick Wechsler).The show’s premiere episode,which aired on Sunday, January 19, and will re-air on February 3 in the show’s regular time slot, saw Bex working as security at a casino. When a top-secret prison known as The Pit explodes, she is summoned due to her connection to one of the escaped killers, Richard Harris. Apparently, during her first case as a profiler, she put Harris behind bars, thinking he would be executed. That didn’t happen, as the convict was instead taken to the now-blown-up top-secret prison.
Asthe lead in the crime drama, Roxburgh is no doubt the perfect choice given her past work on TV, especially in the supernatural seriesManifest,where she portrayed Michaela “Mick” Stone.The Hunting Partyshowrunners also agree — they voiced so, calling Roxburgh “amazing” during a roundtable interview attended by Collider’sSamantha Coley. Speaking of the qualities that made the actress cast as the lead, Bailey said:
“We needed somebody who had obviously a strong presence but somebody who you could believe saying these words. I mean there’s a lot of sort of jargon – psychological jargon that she has to get out, and she just has a way of drawing you in.”
The Hunting PartyEP praised Roxburgh some more, gushing:
“She really brings you into it, and she has sort of an innate ability to like be that strong person, that intelligent person, but then also she can turn on sort of this emotional feeling in a heartbeat, and so, like we’ve found these moments in the season where I mean, yeah, she, she’s got some great emotional beats in the stories.”
Having worked on various productions, Bailey and Coburn noted that it’s not every time the lead is perfectly cast, but inThe Hunting Party’s case, they lucked out with Roxburgh, who is beyond phenomenal. Describing what it’s like watching her perform, Coburn confessed:
“There’s like, with people like her, there’s sort of this ineffable quality where it’s like you could watch them read the phone book, and you’d be like, ‘wow, that’s a star,’ you know what I mean, like she’s just, you sort of can’t look away from her.”
Not only is theMindcagestar that way in front of the camera, but also behind, as Coburn revealed, calling her “the dream number one on the call sheet.” Not to mention, Roxburgh is a great influence on set with the “best attitude” while “holding herself to the highest possible standards.”
The Hunting Partypilot will re-air in its regular time slot on February 3, followed by the show’s second episode on Monday, February 10.
The Hunting Party
Watch on Peacock
