‘Reacher’ Star Agnez Mo Breaks Down Her Brutal Season 4 Finale Fight With Alan Ritchson

Did you know the full scope of your character when you signed on for this** season? Did you know that there was going to be this insane fight scene in the finale? How much were you told? **

MO: When I did the audition, they gave me a few scenes. I think there were three scenes, and those scenes gave me a little snippet of what Lila could be. Obviously, I didn’t know how far the creator and writers would take Lila, but I got a glimpse in those three scenes that they gave me for the audition. After I booked the job and they gave me all the scripts, I was like, “Oh, my God, yes!” **For this to be my comeback to acting, stepping back into the world that I once loved, is both exciting and challenging at the same time. **To be able to present this different type of villain in Reacher, it’s exciting to play. Every single day that I was on set, I worked with my acting coach, John Markland. I also worked with Nick Santora, and we worked on her background. There’s a psychological background to her. It was just so fun to play Lila.

**What did you most enjoy about the layers of the character and the aspects of her that you had to keep hidden at any given time? **

MO: I feel like everybody is picking up on some of the shifts, like the tone of voice and the volume of voice and even a little bit of the body language. In the third episode, she lured him into this emotional connection with sexual tension. What’s so fun about it is discovering who she really is as the story unfolds. As an actor, you have to think several steps ahead because you’re playing a character within a character. Because it’s Reacher’s show and not Lila’s show, there’s very little background and exposition for Lila. My acting coach, Nick and I had to figure it out together. If Lila was being groomed by an older woman, she must have seen this woman as someone she trauma-bonded with. She must have seen this woman as a mother figure and as someone that she constantly wants to please. She was groomed as a killing machine, so she probably has a sociopathic tendency. So, how do you play that? But also, you’re trying to play this damsel in distress character within Lila. That was the fun part of it.

Other than me playing the damsel in distress and not being able to tell the audience just yet that Lila is actually playing something, we also needed to make smart decisions in putting in those sprinkles of mystery. For example, that one scene after the intimacy scene where she says, “Be careful, I don’t want anybody else that I’ve dragged into this getting hurt,” you could see in her expression and feel like, for some reason, you can’t trust her. There were all of these decisions that we made to make sure that when people finally understand that Lila is actually the villain, they can go back to those episodes and see the things that they didn’t catch. It’s a nuanced performance. When we did the intimacy scene, there were a couple of options that we could have gone with there. She could play the whole damsel in distress again because she knew that Reacher felt connected with Lila. She was a badass who was like, “I don’t run away from danger,” but then she was also, “Oh, I need you.” She really played Reacher. He somehow trusted Lila because she helped him. When we were filming that, we felt she needed to show a little bit of the possibility that she was being manipulative. We were figuring Lila out every single day of shooting.

**I love how, as a viewer, it also plays with your emotions because we’re introduced to her and we feel for her before we realize something isn’t quite right. **

MO: When I read the scripts and dove deep into the character, I was trying to play the perspective that maybe Lila does have this genuine thing about her, but she never really explored that side of herself because she’s always been groomed and trained as a killing machine. The only person she knows how to please is Amisha. Thinking about it and being in her world for a second, that must have been a hard life for her because she doesn’t have anybody that cares about her. There’s this little connection with Reacher, and a genuine chemistry and connection. This might be the first time that Lila sees someone who cares about her without needing anything from her.

She is trying to lure him to get this drive, but at the same time, she is also interested in him. The audience is like, “I could see them together. I love them together.” And then, all of a sudden, Amisha swoops in and is like, “No, it’s all about the mission.” I love that it’s a combination of those things. I love to play a character where it’s not just so good or so bad. I feel like that just plays into the human side of it. Even when you’re a villain, you also have the side of you that maybe wasn’t explored enough because you’ve always been taught that you are a villain. Can you imagine the confusion in her mind and her heart, knowing that this is a mission, but then he defends them? That’s what the audience saw in that intimacy scene as well.

I actually really liked that you were wearing a bracelet that would have given away your plan if we knew what it was. Was it fun to have that and know that no one else would know what that was until it was revealed?

MO: Yes, exactly. As an actor, you have to think several steps ahead. You know things about your character that the audience doesn’t know yet, but you can’t really announce them, and you can’t show that yet. You have to be like, “Okay, in this scene, I have to really be Lila, the damsel in distress that needs him.” But then, I have to finally show little sprinkles of her not being trustworthy. There’s something about Reacher that is just too intriguing for Lila to not be there and talk to him. She really wants to know him. She’s also just a manipulative bitch. She’s using all these psychological tricks on him, and I’m pretty sure this is not the first time that she’s done this. She’s done this her whole life. When she reaches out for the cloth, she wants him to ask her about it. I love that people have noticed and picked up on those choices from very early episodes.

I also really liked that Lila and Amisha spoke to each other in their native language and I really appreciated that the show did. How did you feel about that? Was it something that felt important for the character and for the relationship between the characters?

MO: Yeah. We were born in Indonesia. I know a lot of Americans that have lived in the United States since they were like maybe three or four years old who still speak their own language when they meet other people from their country. It’s just very natural. It’s fun to put little sprinkles of that culture. At the same time, I love how Nick [Santora] didn’t highlight that as if that culture is just an attribute because I would hate to play a character where the only thing you know about her is where she came from. It’s just one part of Lila. It was very smooth. It flows into everything else surrounding Lila and Amisha. Because Amisha has groomed Lila since she was nine or 10 years old, or whatever, I’m pretty sure they had an amazing bond, even if it is a trauma bond.

Do you feel like Lila truly knew just how much of an opponent Reacher would be? Do you think she underestimated him and thought he would have been easier to take out?

MO: She definitely underestimated Reacher. Playing into that whole backstory of them just being villains in general, this must not have been their first time going against someone bigger and stronger. Because they’ve been together for so long, they have this confidence of, “No, I think we’re good. I think we’re going to get this right.” But when someone has been working with another person for that long and there’s that unspoken bond, when you see them together at the bowling alley, Lila already knew what Reacher wanted, and she managed to maneuver in that spot. And Amisha is sad, all of a sudden. That’s the kind of bond you have when you’ve been working with the same person for 15 or 20 years. That’s the kind of relationship we were trying to present.

**The fight scene in the finale between Lila, Amisha, and Reacher was so interesting to watch with the choreography of it all. What was it like to rehearse and shoot that scene? Was that a fun fight scene to do? **

MO: It was so fun. We actually spent four or five days shooting that because it’s such a long fight scene. And it’s not just fighting. It’s about the camera angles and camera movement that has to play into everything just so that it feels cohesive. And then, there’s the timing of it. It’s not just one person against another person. It’s two people against one person. So, with the camera movement following the choreography, it was very technical. When I first got the job, they only gave us about a month before we had to go to Toronto, and from that first day, we were at training. For those five or six months, whenever we were not filming, I would always be in the studio to train with the stunt team and the stunt coordinators. And then, when we were not training with them, I would be at the gym, just to make sure that I was ready physically.

I would also bring my karambit – the knife –everywhere I went, so that it would feel like second nature to her. **That was my first time playing with karambit, but you couldn’t tell that in the show. **You’d think that was her baby. I played with it everywhere that I went. I went to a restaurant and was playing with it, and someone was like, “Hey, just put that away.” That’s what was so fun about it. Once I was used to being Lila, I showed up already being her. Even Alan himself knew how much hard work I put into the character, and it showed. It was not something that he was used to. He’s used to punching. With this, he needed to take a second and figure out what was going on. Because we’re obviously shorter than him, it gave us an advantage because we could just slash him wherever, like legs, stomach, and all of that. He’s so used to punching someone bigger or at least the same size, but we were just playing him with karambit.

How do you think Lila felt about Reacher throwing Amisha out the window?

MO: I think that was the first time that she was like, “Oh, shit, this is getting serious.” You could see from the one-on-one fight scene between me and Reacher right after that, that there was a lot of anger and a lot of rage. That’s the reason she was like, “I don’t know what I love more, fucking you or killing you.” It’s all that pent-up anger. She is very composed and very controlled all the time. She never really lost control. But in that fighting scene, you could tell that there was a lot of emotion there.

As the actress playing the character for the full season, how did you feel about the way things ended for Lila? What was your reaction to that?

MO: I think it was supposed to be like that. This show is called Reacher. What’s cool about it is that Nick really plays into the human side of Reacher, especially this season. He almost got killed, and the irony is that it was by women who were arguably a lot smaller than him. But at some point, Reacher has to be the hero. He has to win. That fight scene really embodies everything because it’s the climax of the relationship between Reacher and Lila. To be honest with you, what I really want to know is, what happened to Lila growing up? What happened in the years leading up to her 20s? That’s what I’m really interested in. I did wonder if Lila wasn’t found by Amisha when she was young, would she be a good guy instead of a villain? Maybe she would have been a superhero instead of a supervillain. I want to see the prequel for Lila.

**When she gets stabbed with the syringe and you’re on the ground convulsing and bleeding, did you think a lot about how that should look and how you wanted to physically embody that? **

MO: Even that voice, we didn’t prepare for that. I was in the scene and I was really tired. I was as tired as the character because I did everything. When we did the fighting scene, it was really me doing the fighting scene and I really got tired. I love that because then the voice and the tone and the growling really did come from a genuine place. By genuine I mean that she’s really tired and she really wants to kill Reacher. When she finally realized, “Oh, man, this is actually me who’s going to get killed,” you could see her face change into almost the first episode Lila.** I wanted the audience to wonder if there could be a universe where Lila is actually the Lila in the first episode and the villain Lila is actually a product of her environment and her circumstances. **When she’s dying, it wasn’t something that we prepared. We just wanted to keep it cohesive with the person she injected. I wanted to mimic that to keep it consistent. Logically, she had to have the same reaction from the injection.

**Has this inspired you to do more acting again now? **

MO: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s see how this plays out. There are already a couple of projects being offered, so we’ll see how it goes. Lila is a character that I really enjoyed. But I would love to step back into it more. When I stopped acting, it wasn’t because I stopped loving acting. The industry, at that time – and we’re talking 15 or 20 years ago – wasn’t as healthy as it is now, with the hours and the safety and all of that. I just felt like, “Man, I really can’t do this for a long time.” But now, everything has changed, so we’ll see. I want to try out for Lioness. I think that would be amazing. Or maybe even a Lila spinoff. I’m just talking shit right now.

Reacher is available to stream on Prime Video.

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Omar Madha, Carol Banker, Julian Holmes, Lin Oeding, M.J. Bassett, Norberto Barba, Stephen Surjik, Thomas Vincent

Alan Ritchson