Animal Kingdom, the hard-hitting adaptation of the 2010 film of the same name, has been thrilling audiences for six seasons. Focusing on the Cody family and their ever-evolving dynamics while doing their best to control the crime in the town of Oceanside, the show has pushed the Cody family beyond moral limits and revealed the kind of people they are underneath over six years. It’s also given cast members like Shawn Hatosy’s Pope surprising chances for potentially violent closure while also letting Leila George’s transformation of Janine into the dangerous Smurf help flesh out the world that came before the modern-day.
During an exclusive interview with CBR ahead of Animal Kingdom’s Season 6 two-episode premiere, “1992” and “Rise,” on June19 on TNT, Shawn Hatosy and Leila George reflected on the unique advantage the cast and crew of the crime-thriller had while filming during the pandemic and what it’s like to say goodbye to the Cody clan after spending years in their world.
CBR: Going into this season, I’ve got to imagine there was some trepidation — for Shawn, about what’s awaiting the Cody family, and for Leila, about what you know is coming. What was it like diving into this final batch of scripts?
Shawn Hatosy: I mean, it’s incredibly bittersweet. You know, having spent six seasons working on anything, which is such a rare thing, we’ve become close as a cast. You become family, but then you become so attached to the characters that they feel like you… So as you’re going through these episodes, the emotions are just… They’re easily accessible.
Leila George: Shawn’s done six years of this. For me, it’s just three. I think we have very different… We’re on the same show, but we just have very different experiences of it. Whenever I gear up for a new season, whether it’s the last or the next, I know that I’m going to age 10 years. So I have trepidation about that.
Leila, that’s an interesting point — you get to play Smurf in her early years, long before the current events of the show. Whereas everyone knows they’re going from point A to point B, you’re aware of point B but not the full path that takes you there. What’s most surprising about that kind of part?
George: It’s not as unsurprising as it might seem. I definitely don’t read the scripts and think, “Oh, well, I knew this was gonna happen.” [The showrunners are] throwing us stuff that we didn’t hear about in past seasons. Then it’s nice when it’s stuff that we did hear about in past episodes when it was [Ellen Barkin]’s story. When you have that, you can connect to it, but I think there’s a good balance between new points of pause and references to things we already know about and were looking forward to seeing. I think they do a really good balance of that.
Hatosy: I also think because we, as the audience, we know what Smurf was — we know Ellen’s portrayal of that character, the way she walks, the way she behaves, the way she dresses her hair. We’re very excited as audience members because we’ve watched Leila during this lead-up to Season 6. We get to watch her grow into this monster in a way that is incredibly rewarding and satisfying. As an actor, I get a unique perspective of working with Leila as a director and seeing what she brings to this character. She has a lot to live up to, and she just crushes it and knocks it out of the park.
You’ve been a part of the Cody family now for years, and as it’s all coming to an end, what would you say has been the most surprising lesson you’ve gotten from your experience on Animal Kingdom?
Hatosy: Oh, man. Well, obviously, working through a pandemic has created a lot of difficult scenarios for us as actors and collaborators, but I also think that there’s a degree of that which has made us even more focused and better at our jobs. I think there are a lot of excesses that happen when you’re making television shows, and there was something about the COVID situation that brought everything a little more clearly into focus.
George: I think yes, in that there wasn’t really much for us to get distracted by other than just work. I think we were all so excited to see other human beings after… The whole last two years have been emotionally wild. So I think it almost even balances itself out. It’s just a very different experience, I think, but feeling like you’re all there as a team trying to… If one person in the main cast got sick, the domino effect of what it shuts down… I think what’s really cool is that you realize how much you care about each other.
I think maybe on a set that hadn’t been working together for so many years, you wouldn’t have that kind of care and compassion for the people that really needed to be there. So I think it’s kind of beautiful, in some ways, and [working together on Animal Kingdom] made going through the COVID situation in the last couple of seasons… It cemented that we all really care about each other. So that’s awesome.
Hatosy: In Season 6, obviously, you know that there’s the investigation about the homicide of Catherine. So we’re sort of closing in on perhaps a big revelation. Pope is reflecting. He’s an evolved guy now. He’s finally very comfortable with who he is and maybe even thriving a little. So he’s walking around and looking at the house and feeling things and experiencing things and maybe even coming to feel good about who he is. Then all that is going to sort of be pulled away from him.
Experiencing that through Pope’s eyes but then also, at the same time, through my eyes as the guy that has been here for six years… and just looking at it and looking at these people that I’ve grown to consider family, it was a very emotionally challenging experience, greatly. I’ve never really had that on a show where I knew… I’ve been on shows that have been canceled, but you didn’t know that it was coming to an end. So to be able to experience that with these actors and also the crew that we’ve become so close to, it has been incredibly rewarding.
To see the Codys try one last time to get what they want and avoid what they deserve, check out Animal Kingdom’s sixth and final season, premiering June 19 on TNT.