Tomorrow, Prime Video's Hunters returns for its second and final season, and ahead of tomorrow's premiere, we sat down with How I Met Your Mother star Josh Radnor ("Lonny Flash") to talk about his brilliant and absolutely hysterical portrayal of the team's comic heart.
With Lonny having fallen off the wagon, Radnor tells me about how that provided him with a unique challenge and how he saw a reunion with the Hunters helping Flash get back on track. Plus, he also talks about being the only actor on the series playing another actor and how he used his own process to get into Lonny's unique headspace.
Check out the full video interview below and please remember to SUBSCRIBE to my channel!
ROHAN: Lonny has a lot of anger when the new season starts, and he's fallen off the wagon. What were the conversations like when you were getting back into character? What did you feel like reuniting with the Hunters would do for him?
JOSH: Well, in some ways, I had even talked to David about this, that I think one of the things that's keeping him sober, if not the main thing that's keeping him sober in season one is the Hunters. This hunt, this feeling that he's apart of something larger than himself that he can give his own narcissism a rest for just a moment, and to battle any addiction, you have to dethrone yourself and commit yourself to something larger, and I think he finds that in this hunt. It gives his life a kind of meaning and purpose, and then, the Hunters have this ill-fated trip to Europe that we don't see, but they get disbanded and yeah, he falls off the wagon, he's pining for and in love with one of the Hunters. So, it was easy enough to track what rocked his world, but it was also fun to start the season at such a low point and watch him kind of come back to life.
ROHAN: Do you think that friendship with George helps him get out of that funk? What was it like working with someone new to the crew?
JOSH: It was great. Tommy was awesome. He was so perfectly cast, and, you know, it's funny, one thing I love about Lonnie is he can't quite transcend his own stuff, like he's going to say what's on his mind. He's a narcissist. He is obsessed with fame and his own status in the world, and he also is kind of obsessed with George's beauty, he feels really either inferior or kind of like, he says, it's annoying how good looking he is. So, all that stuff was really fun to play, just leaning into the spiky edges of Lonnie is always fun.
ROHAN: Unlike the other Hunters, you're an actor playing another actor. What kind of challenge does that present when you're stepping into Lonny's headspace? Do you channel your own process at all?
JOSH: Well, I had an acting teacher who used to say it's a 50% meeting of you and the character. So, I'm drawing on things that I understand and know and maybe relate to in Lonnie, and then, there's a whole other world of stuff that is just him and in his own strange, wild stuff. So, I don't think - I certainly didn't need to do much research into what's it like to be an actor, but I did do some research into the 1970s, in the film scene, and I think he's an actor and a movie star at a very particular time in film history. So, it's not like being a movie star now, it was a different deal back then. So, I think you kind of want to honor the time and place that he was being an actor, but, you know, also playing an actor like leaning into - I was telling someone earlier that I don't like photo shoots particularly, I just get self-conscious and feel silly standing there getting my photo taken, but whenever we would do photo shoots for Hunters, I love them because I was Lonnie and Lonnie loves photo shoots, Lonnie loves peacocking around in those outfits and holding a gun and all that stuff. So, he helped me in some ways.
After an accident derails their exploits in Europe, The Hunters must band back together to hunt down history's most infamous Nazi—Adolf Hitler—who's hiding in South America. Meanwhile, a look to the past reveals Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino) encountering a dangerous threat that could unravel his secret and expose his true identity, with explosive reverberations for our Hunters.
Al Pacino returns for the epic series conclusion of Hunters alongside previously announced new series regular Jennifer Jason Leigh and returning series regulars Logan Lerman, Jerrika Hinton, Lena Olin, Josh Radnor, Tiffany Boone, Carol Kane, Louis Ozawa, Kate Mulvany, and Greg Austin.
Hunters is produced by Amazon Studios, Monkeypaw Productions and Halcyon Studios. The series is created and executive produced by David Weil, who serves as showrunner; Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld from Monkeypaw Productions; Phil Abraham, David J. Rosen, Jerry Kupfer, and Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. David Ellender and Matt Loze from Halcyon Studios also serve as executive producers.