How ‘Lioness’ Season 2 Tests New Recruit Genesis Rodriguez

[This story contains spoilers from the third episode of season two of Lioness, “Along Came a Spider.”]

Plans were set in motion during the two-episode premiere of Lioness when a U.S. Congresswoman’s husband and young son were murdered at home by a Mexican cartel, and she was kidnapped and taken across the border at the behest of a Chinese government official doing business with the drug dealers.

The CIA-led Quick Reaction Force team (QRF) led by Lioness program director Joe McNamara (Zoe Saldaña) was secretly greenlit by the U.S. Secretary of State (Morgan Freeman) to go into Mexico and rescue the Congresswoman from her kidnappers. But a new part of the mission, after the rescue, is to end the cartel and the Chinese official who ordered the kidnapping. Joe and her superiors, CIA Senior Supervisor Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman) and CIA Deputy Director Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly), discover that there is a highly decorated U.S. Army helicopter pilot in Iraq named Capt. Josephina “Josie” Carrillo, played by Genesis Rodriguez, who is the niece of the cartel leader in Mexico.

The CIA decides that, for the benefit of the country, they must strip Carrillo of her Army career and force her into the Lioness program to betray her family so that target can be reached. To do this, they decide to make up a story that Carrillo killed American soldiers in Iraq during a friendly fire incident and is being court-martialed. Her cover is that she is kicked out of the Army and runs to her family for support and a job. In an intense scene in episode two, Joe flew to Iraq to reveal what she wants Carrillo to do by asking her over and over again, “Do you love your country?” Carrillo knows of the Lioness program and wanted no part of it, but she isn’t given any other option. So she lies and denies that she knows anything about the cartel being part of her family (or even that she speaks Spanish).

At the beginning of episode three, we see the Lioness team bugging Carrillo’s family home in Dallas, and a fake story on the news runs about the friendly fire incident. Joe is visiting her family before meeting the team at a secret base and they start training Carrillo on how to be a CIA Black Ops Lioness operative. But it’s during her training that the team discovers Carrillo lied to Joe about what she knows and doesn’t know about her family. The team now sees her as a mole. Carrillo reminds them she saved their lives when they were under attack in Iraq. And Joe says she’s about to return the favor when she hands Carrillo a phone to call her father and start the process of infiltrating her family.

The choice to showing love for your country by betraying your family is not a position the actor who plays Carillo would ever want to be asked of in real life. Rodriguez recently told The Hollywood Reporter she sees it as a “loaded” question.

“I love my country,” Rodriguez said emphatically of that pivotal scene. “I think what Josie faces this season is a lot of different themes and very, very high stakes choices. She has to deal with sacrifice, with questions of loyalty with family, and with what you are willing to give up. And for me, it was amazing to be able to play all these things. But I put myself in my character’s shoes and I don’t know how she did it, on the strength that she had to have to face that. So, I am just so grateful I got this opportunity to be able to play all of that complexity in one character.”

Michael Kelly said it may seem harsh what a woman recruit may go through in the Lioness program (which is based off of a real program). But the mission is the mission, and it’s necessary.

“[CIA Deputy Director Westfield] has great respect for the program,” Kelly told THR. “He knows, in his opinion, that it’s a necessary program. He fights with the Secretary of State and the President to keep it what it is. He fights for his women in the group because he believes in the program and believes it’s necessary. Sometimes that’s the only way to get to the target. So it’s sort of by any means necessary. I think he’s very much down with the project.”

Morgan Freeman, who plays U.S. Secretary of State Edwin Mullins, told THR that his character’s position requires him to use the Lioness team to quench disorder in the world.

“He’s up to his neck in involvement here,” Freeman explained. “I think if you are Secretary of State, that means you’re going around, number one, trying to put out fires. And this here, it’s just Black Ops; so, you’re trying to start fires. You want to burn things out, you want to cauterize. That’s what they’re doing here, going into different spots, cleaning it out and cauterizing it. We’re talking about terrorist cells and cartels.”

Rodriguez said viewers should hang on for future episodes, because she believes audiences will not be able to predict the arc of what comes next.

“The thing I love about Taylor [Sheridan, creator, who makes a cameo in season two] the most is that you just never know,” Rodriguez said. “It’s little twists and turns, and that is what keeps you hooked. And I really would hate to spoil anything, because you really would not expect anything that happens in this season.”

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Lioness releases new episodes Sundays on Paramount+.