Warning! This story contains spoilers for The Hunting Party Season 2, Episode 2, “Adrian Gallo.”
In the year that Agent Rebecca “Bex” Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh) has been chasing down escaped serial killers on NBC’s thriller series The Hunting Party, she’s seen some truly twisted examples of humanity.
Together with her elite team, CIA agent Jacob Hassani (Patrick Sabongui), former prison guard Shane Florence (Josh McKenzie) and intel officer Jennifer Morales (Sara Garcia), Bex has to get inside the minds of some deeply damaged offenders to anticipate their next moves. But in Season 2, Episode 2, “Adrian Gallo,” Bex also gets the rare opportunity for peer bonding with another woman in law enforcement who’s lost a colleague in the field. Detective Erica Burke is played by Emmy-winning actress Niecy Nash-Betts.
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Bex gets the opportunity to commiserate with Burke, who broke the original case around this week’s titular escapee. But as is so often the case on The Hunting Party, things are a bit more complicated than they seem.
In this week’s NBC Insider exclusive interview with Roxburgh, she discusses working with Nash-Betts for the first time, the duality of the role and how The Hunting Party writers have upped their game when it comes to strange cases this season.
Melissa Roxburgh welcomed Niecy Nash-Betts as a scene partner
Niecy Nash-Betts guest-stars on this week’s episode as Erica Burke. Burke is a seemingly forthright detective whose pursuit of Adrian Gallo took a huge toll on her career, and mental health, after she finally brought him to justice. She’s provides Bex the rare opportunity to confess the stresses of the job she’s experiencing, leading them to bond over their shared experiences.
“I always love it when they bring in cool women and amazing actresses,” Roxburgh said of the show’s female guest-star casting. “Niecy’s work I wasn’t actually that familiar with. I know who she is, and that she’s an acting powerhouse.”
Roxburgh said that she loved being able to play against the duality that Nash-Betts brought to her Burke character. “Being able to interact with her and play with her, especially when she’s kind of playing two people — this good guy, and then we see that she’s not necessarily the good guy. She had a great demeanor about that because she herself comes across light. But she’s also…I don’t know if I’m allowed to say ‘badass,’ but yeah, that helps with the second half of her story.”
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Niecy Nash-Betts’ Hunting Party character went rogue
As it turns out, Burke became so psychologically compromised chasing Gallo that she has turned to serial killing. In the final minutes of the episode, Bex discovers that her new “friend” has been burying her own kills in the walls of her home. Thirteen of them!
It’s a twist Roxburgh didn’t see coming. She gives praise to their writers who come from a variety of backgrounds, which she said allows them to come up with such creatively, tortured characters.
“I think some of them are twists on killers that we know. Like, we have sort of an Ed Gein character that comes in,” the actress teased for a future episode. “These are all renditions of stuff that we know. And then I think there are some that are far too crazy to be real,” she laughed.
New episodes of The Hunting Party air Thursdays at 10/9c on NBC and stream next-day on Peacock. Stream The Hunting Party Season 1 on Peacock now.