Talks

[This story contains spoilers from Terminal List season one.]

David DiGilio is riding high on the Moroccan set of The Terminal List season two. 

As the showrunner in charge of adapting Jack Carr’s Terminal List book series to the screen, his well-received prequel series, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, just released its first three episodes on Amazon Prime Video. He’s also less than two months out from the release of Tron: Ares, which is a feature project he helped originate way back in 2011.

In 2022, when the Chris Pratt-led mothership series became one of Prime Video’s most-streamed series, Amazon wanted to meet the demand for more Terminal List in a relatively timely fashion. Unfortunately, Pratt’s feature schedule was at odds with such an ask. Thus, Pratt proposed an alternative. 

“[Pratt] was actually the one who realized, based on his schedule, that we were going to have a long time between Terminal List season one and season two. So he didn’t want the fans to be left waiting, and he was like, ‘We should do Ben’s story,’” DiGilio tells The Hollywood Reporter while on location in Morocco.

Ben’s story is that of Taylor Kitsch’s former Navy SEAL turned CIA operative, Ben Edwards, and the spinoff prequel series, Dark Wolf, instantly became a “no-brainer” to DiGilio and his writers room of veterans and former service members. In the finale of Terminal List season one, Edwards served as the final name on James Reece’s (Pratt) terminal list, signifying the completion of Reece’s tour of vengeance after the mass execution of his former Navy SEALs platoon, as well as his wife and daughter. 

Edwards admitted that he helped put the assassination plot in motion due to the foreknowledge that his one-time brothers-in-arms were all dying from brain tumors. They were involuntarily subjected to a faulty experimental drug trial to combat the effects of PTSD, and Edwards preferred they die with their boots on, not in a hospital bed. While Edwards insisted he had nothing to do with Reece’s family’s demise, Reece couldn’t look past the rub of the situation, specifically the $20 million that Edwards received to betray their brotherhood.

Dark Wolf takes place five years before the events of Terminal List season one, exploring the end of Ben’s tenure as a Navy SEAL and the beginning of his CIA career that would lead to stark betrayal. Being fully committed to the expansion of Carr’s universe, Pratt still carved out time from his busy schedule to support Kitsch’s series. He appears in three episodes total.

“At the time, Chris said, ‘I’m going to be in it, but just to be clear, this is not my show. This is Taylor’s show,’” DiGilio says. “Chris wanted to be there for him in the way that so many great actors have been there for Chris, and that was very cool to see.”

As for the future, DiGilio hopes that Dark Wolf will have its own multi-season run alongside The Terminal List, especially since Dark Wolf characters will be crossing over into the parent series’ second season: “Dark Wolf was really built not just as a first spinoff, but as a way to bridge the Jack Carr cinematic universe. We had this opportunity to not just give the fans of Terminal List season one a deeper dive on Ben, but to also really set up these fan-favorite characters like Raife Hastings, Mo Farooq, Jules Landry [for Terminal List season two].”

Back in 2011, THR reported that DiGilio was writing a follow-up to Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy (2010). However, in 2012, Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm derailed Tron 3’s pre-production. Nevertheless, the project continued to simmer, and now, despite 14 years and 15 screenwriters in between, DiGilio has a story credit on what became Tron: Ares. 

“Man, they went through something like 15 writers. When the movie finally got made, I heard that the title was Tron: Ares, and Ares is a character that I had created in the process as the villain,” DiGilio shares. “And over time, Ares morphed from being the villain to being the title character. But that overarching story remained the same.”

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, DiGilio also explains how Ben Edwards’ backstory was spun out of Raife Hastings’ (Tom Hopper) personal history in Carr’s second novel, True Believer. The latter book is also serving as the basis for Terminal List season two.

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At the end of The Terminal List season one, it’s revealed that Taylor Kitsch’s character, Ben Edwards, betrayed his brothers and set them up for slaughter. A corporation paid him to help cover up the fact their drug trial gave his former SEALs brethren brain tumors. Chris Pratt’s James Reece then put an end to Ben, completing his terminal list. So what prompted you to take a deeper look at Ben’s past in Dark Wolf? 

Ben Edwards was the natural choice to be our first spinoff character. The chatter in the fan base about whether or not Ben deserved his fate was the loudest in terms of a response to any of season one’s plot points. And that started because of the nuance and care Taylor brought to the role. He wasn’t just a typical tough guy-best friend; there was a pathos Taylor brought. There was also a nostalgic quality in every scene that Taylor and Chris did together. “If they could only go back” was a feeling that was constantly happening between Ben and Reece. So we said, “What if we do go back? What if we tell the story of what Ben loved about the brotherhood and how he reached a point where he was able to betray it?”

You probably spitballed some ideas for Ben’s backstory during season one of Terminal List. How does Dark Wolf compare to what you first imagined? 

It ended up being a kind of revelation that came out of the season one finale. We were working closely with [novelist] Jack Carr. I’ve had a wonderful working relationship and friendship with Jack since I came on board in 2019. He had a backstory for Tom Hopper’s Raife Hastings that was really complex and interesting. It’s a moment that happened in Iraq. When we were working on the finale of season one, we wanted Raife in the finale, so we tried to cast someone back then just for this cameo moment. 

But Raife ended up being this notepad left on a boat because it turns out it’s very hard to cast an actor for an ongoing role if they have literally one scene. But what came out of the finale discussion with the writers room and with Jack was the idea that there was not just a one-sided relationship between any of these characters. There’s a triangle. And in this triangle, you have James Reece in the middle, Ben Edwards on one pillar and Raife Hastings on the other.

So we decided that we would take Raife Hastings’ backstory — which is really explained in Jack Carr’s second book, True Believer — and fold Ben into it. It would become a decisive and divisive moment between these three friends. Ultimately, it would be the thing that sets them all on different paths. So it really came out of talking about, “Well, what if Ben was involved with that thing that Raife did? What would that do to them?” You hear that backstory mentioned and alluded to in the [season one] finale, and you hear how much Ben hates Raife. You also get that sense of Reece being caught in the middle. 

The truth is, that happens all the time in human relationships. You form bonds with two people who should get along but don’t, and you become the fulcrum between them. You’re trying to make it work, but you know that it might not. So going back and exploring how Ben and Raife’s partnership frayed also became a foundation for season one of Dark Wolf.

Seeing the lengths that the brotherhood went to for Ben in Dark Wolf made his treachery on the mothership series all the more frustrating. Does that response track with you? 

Yeah, and I hope everybody feels that. The truth is that Ben is the hero of his story, and Ben is somebody who truly cares about Reece and Alpha Platoon. He explains the moral and emotional justification for what he did. He wanted his brothers to die with their boots on. He didn’t want them to rot away [from a brain tumor] in some hospital bed.

We immediately saw genuine friendship and chemistry in the first Zoom meeting between Chris and Taylor, and we’ve talked a lot with Taylor about how Ben never lies. He just doesn’t tell the whole truth, and that’s a big thing. He truly cares about Reece and his family, and it’s ultimately what the conspiracy of season one does to Reece’s wife and daughter, Lauren and Lucy, that puts Ben on the path of vengeance as well. He is a full participant in the things that Reece does in season one, and he can be a participant because he’s as angry and as betrayed as Reece was. He thought he was only doing this one thing.

In the beginning of the Dark Wolf pilot, there’s a wonderful moment of these four SEALs sitting around a campfire at the FOB, and you see how genuine their brotherhood is. You see that respect and that trust and that laughter and friendship. And that’s the arc, really, of the entire series, which we hope goes on for multiple seasons. You see a guy who cared so deeply about the brotherhood at the beginning of his journey and then you see him get to a place where he could be manipulated into betraying it. 

You have a different arc happening with James Reece. He falls much more on the light wolf-side. He’s capable of very dark things, but there’s a genuine light that leads him. And the question with Ben is, did the light wolf ever have a chance?

I know he has a vested interest as an EP of both series and the star of Terminal List, but it still impresses me that Chris Pratt was willing to show up for a few episodes in a genuine supporting role. Were you pretty amazed that a mega movie star would be game to serve someone else’s story like this?

It’s interesting because the perception of movie stars is built on things like Instagram and marketing. But Chris, through his social media, is incredibly authentic, and he brings people into his world, his faith, his family and other things he cares so deeply about. So it’s not surprising with Chris because he is a genuine storyteller. What excites him so much about what he does is not just the acting side of it, and the accolades and attention that come from it. He’s an incredibly good actor, and we love that he takes on the weight and drama of this role that is so different from the more comedic or pop-star level roles that he does.

But what he really wants is to tell a great story. And he was actually the one who realized, based on his schedule, that we were going to have a long time between Terminal List season one and season two. He didn’t want the fans to be left waiting, and he was like, “We should do Ben’s story.” We then gathered back together in fall of 2022 and went, “Oh my God, this is a no brainer.” And because the Reece-Ben-Raife relationships are so foundational to this Jack Carr cinematic universe, Chris was like, “I want to be in it.” 

We talked about how many episodes, et cetera, and then we decided on three episodes. At the time, Chris said, “I’m going to be in it, but just to be clear, this is not my show. This is Taylor’s show.” Taylor is such an incredible fucking actor who is having a real breakout year between American Primeval and Dark Wolf. So Chris wanted to be there for him in the way that so many great actors have been there for Chris, and that was very cool to see.

It appears that Terminal List franchise author Jack Carr was more involved in the writing of Dark Wolf. It’s not an unheard-of scenario to have the mind behind the source material directly involved, but it’s still pretty rare. So how would you describe your dynamic together?

Jack is our godfather, so to speak. All of this material is built off of characters that he created, and we really love the feedback, the inspiration, the love of history, the love of reading, the love of pop culture. He is an incredible movie reference savant, so it’s fantastic to have all that. 

He is not always in the room; he is constantly writing books and podcasting. So it is very hard for him to be in the room with us, but we make sure that he has eyes on everything that we do. To step away from the books for the first time, we wanted to make sure that he was integral to the creative and creation process. So, in September of ‘22, I flew up to Park City along with executive producer Jared Shaw, who’s a former Navy SEAL. Max Adams, who’s another executive producer and former Army Ranger, Zoomed in, and we just did a weekend deep dive with Jack on what Dark Wolf might be. It was great to have Jack there from the jump, given his knowledge of geopolitical events, the brotherhood, these characters and his books’ mythology.

Iran’s nuclear program is the subject of much scrutiny in Dark Wolf, just as it’s been in real life for ages now. In terms of resonance, do you guys view recent headlines as a net-positive for the show? 

I don’t know if we think about it, to be honest. It’s just part of working with Jack Carr. He is a finger-on-the-geopolitical-pulse storyteller. When we met in 2022, we tried to figure out what this global conspiracy would be, and he was like, “Israel-Iran, there are not enough stories being told about that conflict.” And so we were like, “Yeah, let’s run at that. 2015 lines up. This is fascinating. Let’s go.” 

Dark Wolf is set specifically in 2015, which deliberately predates all these current conflicts, and we worked with the cultural consultants. We have something in our writers’ room called Research Wednesday where we talk to experts on different topics that we tackle in the show. So it was all built off of looking back at the situation in 2015, and it just happens to mirror and reflect the world we live in today.

You mentioned earlier that you want Dark Wolf to run for multiple seasons, but is Dark Wolf the last we’ll see of Ben Edwards overall? Or are flashbacks on the table still via the mothership?

The conceit is one of the great things about [The Terminal List]. A man [Reece] is on a vengeance and what we call a violent redemption path after that, and his brain tumor causes conflation. So there’s always a chance that these characters return. 

We decided we’re not just going to make a new show in Dark Wolf. We decided we’re going to make a new way to make shows. I refer to it as team television, and it’s a very time-intensive process because everyone gets a say. There’s no bad idea. It’s a way to empower performers, the authors and anyone, down to the set dressers, with a creative stake. If an idea is sparked, you really start to talk about it, and it can lead to places. 

A script is a living, breathing entity. It’s not something that’s chiseled in stone. Until it’s captured in the final rectangle, it can be improved and be made more authentic and emotional. And one of the great things about Taylor and Chris is that they are actors who are always challenging the material. So when you have people like that, you want to try to keep them involved in as many shows as possible.

You’re in production right now on The Terminal List season two. Certain Dark Wolf characters are crossing over, but does Dark Wolf also set up any story points in season two?

Dark Wolf was really built not just as a first spinoff, but as a way to bridge the Jack Carr cinematic universe. It starts with this deep, dark, psychological revenge thriller and becomes, in the later books, this globe-trotting espionage thriller. It’s quite a change to go from that world of vengeance across North America into season two, which is based on the True Believer storyline. A globe-hopping James Reece is chasing down a giant global conspiracy. 

We realized that, through Dark Wolf, we had this opportunity to not just give the fans of Terminal List season one a deeper dive on Ben, but to also really set up these fan-favorite characters like Raife Hastings, Mo Farooq, Jules Landry. They appear in book two, True Believer, but they are set up primarily through backstory in that book. And it’s very hard to do backstory on television. It’s extremely difficult in a medium that moves so fast with so much economy of storytelling and forward propulsion to stop and tell everybody where people came from. 

We realized we had an opportunity to bring these characters into Ben’s 2015 origin story, and then have them return later after creating familiarity and a real emotional connection to them. The surprise to us was that it wasn’t just the characters from the books that we love so much and wanted to bring back; there are other characters from Dark Wolf’s incredible ensemble who will make appearances as well.

Lastly, I was combing through THR’s archives last night and found a 2011 exclusive about you being hired to write a third Tron movie. Fourteen years later, you ended up with a story credit on what is now known as Tron: Ares. Do you now know how much of your material remains in the final product?

Yeah, it’s incredible. In the strange job of studio screenwriting in Hollywood, I guess you could say that a project is never dead. I am a lifelong sci-fi fan and child of the ‘80s, and Tron is a movie that really stuck with me from my boyhood. Having just seen Tron: Legacy, I got the chance to go in there and pitch on [Tron 3] with Joe Kosinski, and then build that out with [producer] Justin Springer and the team. 

We were actually this close to filming. We were in heavy prep at the time, and the guys were scouting over in Shanghai when Disney purchased Lucasfilm. So that just sucked the air out of the room, because the biggest franchise in Hollywood was going to take their attention. It was a tough blow for us. [Screenwriter] Jesse Wigutow, who I’ve gotten to know through the process, came in and did a great pass after me. So things were rocking and rolling, but it got shut down. 

Fortunately, Justin Springer is a tenacious producer, and Jesse is a great writer. Man, they went through something like 15 writers, but Jesse stuck with it throughout. When the movie finally got made, I heard that the title was Tron: Ares, and Ares is a character that I had created in the process as the villain. And Jared [Leto], I believe, was attached at the time to play it. I don’t know the full process, but he may have also been one of the champions who kept it going. And over time, Ares morphed from being the villain to being the title character.

Once it got made, Disney sent out, via the WGA, the notice of tentative writing credit. So I saw that I was sharing “story by” with Jesse and that Jesse was getting “screenplay by,” and I was thrilled. But, of course, you end up in arbitration when you have 15 writers, and the positive out of that experience was reading the script and getting to see that the foundation remained. The foundational structure remained, even if Sam and Quorra [from Tron: Legacy] had moved on. We no longer had those actors [Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde] under option, and a new wonderful cast is in there now. But that overarching story remained the same. So I was really happy to share that credit with Jesse, and I’m fired up to see the movie.

Fourteen years later… only in Hollywood.

I truly, truly ascribe to the “slow and steady wins the race” adage. There’s no rush out here. I’ve been writing since 2001, and I really found my true love in showrunning and creating shows. It’s just the best of all worlds, especially getting to do it with people like Chris, Taylor, Max, Jared, Jack, Fred Toye, Kat Samick and Antoine Fuqua. This [Terminal List] team is just ridiculous. As a former athlete, to be able to combine my love of storytelling and the creative process with teamwork is a dream come true.

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The Terminal List: Dark Wolf’s first three episodes are now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.