Conducting international manhunts. Profiling dangerous men. Engaging in hand-to-hand combat. Staging shootouts. Tracking down suspects via speedy footraces. Interrogating hardened criminals with wide, lifeless eyes. These exceedingly difficult challenges collectively comprise an average day in the life for this sharpshooter – at least, that is, for the special agent she depicts onscreen. “She’s kind of a bull in a china shop in a lot of ways,” star Melissa Roxburgh tells me about playing Rebecca “Bex” Henderson in NBC’s hit drama series The Hunting Party. “I sometimes operate like that. I am pretty good at speaking my mind. Sometimes that gets me into trouble, and yet I don’t want it any other way.”
Recently renewed for a second season, The Hunting Party blew fans away with its unique premise of a top-secret prison experiencing a mass breakout after a mysterious explosion started the series off with a bang. Crudely referred to as “The Pit”, the classified underground facility appeared like a massive industrial beehive housing hundreds of the world’s most notorious serial killers, shortly before it went up in flames. The real kicker, however, is that all of these prisoners were already supposed to be dead. Instead, their executions were faked, and they’ve become unwilling participants in government funded therapeutic experiments, all in the supposedly sketchy name of advanced rehabilitation.
Now, with the remnants of The Pit charred and broken, and several inmates on the loose, it’s up to Bex and her assigned prison recovery task force assembled by the U.S. government to hunt down these incarcerated persons and return them to home base, before it’s too late.
Yet, when the blast first strikes, Henderson is nowhere near any sort of bureaucratic power. In fact, the ex FBI agent has ventured about as far outside of the realm of any federal regime as she possibly can. Honing her profiling skills in a less intense environment, Bex now spends her days working security at the Royal Hearts Casino, carefully watching the eyes and hands of every patron who sets foot under their dazzling lights.
“When we meet her at the casino, she’s not doing the job that she wants,” explains Roxburgh. “She’s overqualified for that position. She’s way too intelligent. I mean personally, I think it’d be kind of interesting to profile drunk gamblers, but for Bex, she can do it in her sleep. She’s just ready for something bigger.”
Back when she was working for the Federal Bureau of Intelligence, Agent Henderson made a name for herself as the best profiler in the business, and together, she and her partner Agent Oliver Odell (Nick Wechsler) tracked down and arrested a slew of instigators. Still, during one of the more difficult cases, her partner broke down during an interrogation scene. Hoping to learn the whereabouts of one of their captive’s victims, and stationed within an isolated cabin in the woods, Odell locked Bex outside, doused the suspect in kerosine, lit a match, and started a fire. Panicked, the convict quickly revealed the location of the girl he had kidnapped, but even after he told the truth, Odell didn’t put out the flames. The suspect burned alive, while Agent Henderson pounded on the locked cabin door, trying to stop her partner from carrying out his horrific crime.
After that, Odell disappeared for a number of years, leaving behind a swath of confusion, as well as an orphaned preteen girl named Sam (Kyra Leroux), who Henderson located based on the suspect’s confession, and shortly thereafter adopted. Bex didn’t break, but she didn’t stick around either. Putting the regime behind her, she headed to the casino, and attempted to live a quiet life raising her newfound daughter.
“She acts like she’s got everything together, and we haven’t seen her crumble,” says Roxburgh. “She hides everything. It’s like, mask on, shove it down, get through. Because I think that if she let her emotions come up, if she let her feelings about the Odell situation, or what happened to her in the past, or even just encountering killers constantly, I think anyone would crumble. You do have to have a tough skin. So, she’s not down and out, but she’s definitely in a rut. It’s not her favorite phase of life, let’s say.”
One could argue that’s why when Henderson is arraigned by familiar faces and wrangled into this hunting party, it doesn’t take too much persuasion for Bex to agree to lead the team. However, when it comes to her character’s motives, Roxburgh sees things a little differently.
“I like to think that Bex has her own version of psychopathology in the sense that she is somewhat addicted to catching them,” she muses. “The same way they are serial killers, she’s a serial profiler. She doesn’t know how to help herself. She doesn’t know how to turn it off. She doesn’t know how to stop fighting for justice. She doesn’t know how to stop protecting people because in her mind, if she does, she’s not just giving up on the current, she’s giving up on the past.” Henderson profiled her first serial killer when she was just fifteen years old. While staying over at a friend’s one evening, her intuition led her down to the basement, where she discovered the same items described by local authorities as being used in an ongoing case. Once she called the police, her friend’s father was arrested, but not before he took his own daughter’s life. As Roxburgh describes it, an additional component to her character’s drive is her grief, and her guilt: “It’s another version of her letting down people around her, AKA her friend getting murdered. So I think it’s this neverending hamster wheel of, ‘I have to make up for the past.’ So I think she says yes, because it’s an addiction to her.”
She continues, “Almost masochistic, in a weird way too. I don’t think it’s as happy-go-lucky as catharsis, necessarily. There is a version of Bex that’s like, someone needs to profile her. Someone needs to be like, ‘Hey, you gotta stop working so much, and just live a life.’”
Roxburgh can relate to the woman she portrays in many ways, especially when it comes to sacrifice. Just as the Hunting Party character finds herself having to leave behind her daughter at home in the name of the pursuit, so, too, has Roxburgh had to choose between work and family. During her last leading role on the sci-fi Netflix series Manifest, the Canadian starlette spent half a decade thousands of miles away from her loved ones in order to chase her dreams.
“The last show shot in New York for five years,” she remembers. “I started to watch my older sister have kids, and my little brother started to have kids, and I’m watching life over FaceTime, or over social media, or just texting them.”
Growing more homesick by the day, Roxburgh was thrilled to learn that not only did she land the starring role on an exciting new NBC series, but also that The Hunting Party would be shooting in her hometown of Vancouver.
“Being back in Vancouver was awesome, because I got to actually hug my nephews, and I got to sit down at family dinner, and those things,” she smiles. “I didn’t realize how much I missed them until I got them back. And their production stages were five minutes away from my parents’ house, and five minutes away from my sister’s house, so at lunchtime, I’d just pop over and say hi. It was really nice to go home.”
The daughter of Cam Roxburgh, a pastor who founded his own church in Vancouver, and Shelley Roxburgh, formerly known as Shelley Walpole, a famous professional tennis player who competed in grand slam events around the globe and was once known as one of the best players in the world – to put it simply, her family knows a thing or two about chasing goals. When asked if they ever visited the set of The Hunting Party, however, the young star jokes, “They’re over it”, noting her kin’s hysterically candid nature: “One of the times my dad came to set, his feedback was, ‘Do they get mad when you talk that fast?’ So I was like, ‘All right, we’re going to cut these visits a little shorter.’”
She goes on to express how much her folks have always supported her, and her deep appreciation for their ongoing love and devotion. “It’s just funny introducing them to this world,” she says with a twinkle in her eye. “They are the most blunt people I’ve ever met. And I’ve sort of become that way because of them. They keep me honest, for sure.”
As if shooting season one around her old stomping grounds weren’t fated enough, Roxburgh reveals that she actually studied criminal psychology during her days as a fresh faced pupil back in college. “I just was really into criminology at the time, so I started going down that route,” she recalls. “And then when I got into university, I started taking courses there, too. I think I realized I wanted to be an actress to be able to go into stories that were abnormal from normal life, but I didn’t actually want to be a criminologist. My family had a friend who was in that, and they were like, ‘No, you see a lot of dark stuff. You don’t want to devote your life to that.’ So, I made the decision to do the pretend version instead.”
Although Roxburgh is quick to point out the correlation between her undergrad studies and her current occupation, she’s a bit more hesitant to assign correlation.
“I think it curated the fascination,” she says. “I don’t know if it really gave me much insight into different psychologies of killers that we’re doing now. And going into season two, we have some really wacky killers, which I’m excited for people to see. So, I can’t say that I’m a full-blown criminal profiler based on my couple of courses in university, but I think honestly, life has informed me the most. As you get older, realizing that everyone comes from such unique backgrounds, and they are the way they are because of their own traumas, or their own neuroses or their upbringings.”
As humble as she is quick-witted, Roxburgh gives all the credit to the writers, as well as the men and women from the FBI, the CIA, and the veterans who have trained her and spoken with her over the years for her various projects, including programs like Valor, Mindcage, Quantum Leap and Marine 4: Moving Target.
“I’ve kind of been the gun girl for a long time in my career, which is awesome, because she’s tough and she isn’t scared – she goes into situations that I personally wouldn’t go into, and so it’s fun to play that,” says Roxburgh. “I’ve had a lot of different shows hire me as that character and throughout the roles, I’ve had a lot of gun training. I’ve gone to gun ranges. I’ve had ex-FBI agents talk to me. I’ve had ex-CIA talks to me. I’ve had people show me the technical aspects of clearing a room, of shooting a gun properly, of holding your gun properly – even down to how you walk when you’re holding a gun. Over the years, that has been very interesting to me, because I have a whole new respect for these teams.”
She admits, “I had this stereotype of these people in my brain, but in talking to the different people along the way, at the end of the day, they’re just humans as we all are. And so I think it was just understanding that these people are heroes, in the sense that they put duty and other people before themselves in a lot of moments. I can’t think of anything more selfless.”
While her loved ones might have assumed Roxburgh would’ve easily become a profiler if she weren’t a thespian, the actress shies away from the comparison. “I don’t think I do well at gunpoint, which Bex seems to find herself in every episode.”
The overlap between the woman onscreen and the actress playing her behind the camera is defined more by their shared empathy, even toward some of the most arguably undeserving.
“I think as a society, we all shove things down so much, and we lose empathy for other people to the point where we don’t even know how to get it back,” says Roxburgh. “I do believe in rehabilitation over incarceration. I do think that there is something to helping people get better, and I don’t think that people are a lost cause, and I think that’s kind of what Bex believes in too. I think when she’s profiling all of these killers, she definitely has opinions on some more than others. But I think the idea of them being used as science experiments irks her. And for me personally, if I found out the government was using prisoners or anyone and lab testing them, I think I would have a problem with that.”
Roxburgh also shares a deep sense of respect for her character, especially as a powerful woman in a highly competitive workforce that often calls for thinking on one’s feet.
“Women in the workplace definitely have a harder job most of the time as far as being heard, as far as their ideas being given respect and credit. And I think no matter what industry you’re in, you have to navigate it differently as a woman. And that’s not to say that men don’t listen, but sometimes it is harder. I think that you just have to have a little extra intelligence in your pocket to know how to navigate certain situations. And what I love about Bex is that she knows how to play the chess game, but she also doesn’t really care about the chess game at the same time. She’s like, we’re going through all this red tape, bureaucracy, and I don’t care about any of that. I’m here for one job – the job that we’re supposed to be doing. So I’m going to do it. If you want to get in my way, good luck.”
She continues, “I feel like there’s been a lot of times in my career where I’ve said things and it’s been dismissed, and yet it comes around like a week later, someone else has the same idea and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s a great idea.’ You just kind of have to sit there and go, ‘Uh-huh.’ But I think what I’ve learned as a woman in this industry is that empathy and being kind – which women inherently have – get us a lot further in other ways too. Because we care about the team, and we care about the job, and we care about not climbing necessarily for ourselves, but for the whole of what we’re working on. And I think that what I’ve really liked about being number one on the call sheet in this circumstance, is that I get the opportunity to bring everyone together. I get to create the team that all gets along.”
She adds, “I don’t know if you can say this in an interview, but I also liked that she was just no bullshit, and she’d gone through stuff. I think finding a character who’s not just one note, who’s not cookie cutter perfect – it’s been really nice.”
The Hunting Party‘s first season definitely hosts a wide array of darkly intriguing antagonists, from a female serial killer named Brenda Lowe (Colleen Foy) who feeds her victims to the endangered wolves she claims as part of her land (“I empathize with that character,” Roxburgh says with a grin about Lowe who swears revenge on the men who hurt her pack. “It’s really sad, actually. I’m a big animal lover. I mean, she was just trying to protect her wolves!”), to a more deranged psychopath named Tom Beecher (Jay Paulson), who is motivated by his victims’ helplessness, and who Roxburgh divulges, “that one actually almost made me want to throw up when I was watching one of the scenes, because it was an enjoyment of suffering”.
The actress promises that season two will be lighter – even, perhaps, somewhat camp?
“I think right off the bat, people will be a little shocked. There’s actually quite a few plot twists along the way that I think people really like,” she says. “I really think people are going to like season two more, to be honest, because the killers that we’re bringing in, even amongst us cast, writers and producers, we’ve all agreed that this season is a notch up. It’s weirder. It’s quirkier. I think a lot of the personalities of the characters are starting to come out a little bit more, too. I think we’ve really found our groove with having fun in a very unfun circumstance.”
As far as her own vision for the second season goes, if Roxburgh had it her way, she already knows what she’d have planned for Bex. “I want to see her snap,” she says. “I think she’s got this weird addiction to the world, and the mind of these serial killers, and figuring them out and tracking them down. Odell snapped in the sense that he wanted to hurt this guy for hurting people. I don’t think that it would be like that for her, but I do think if she gets too involved in it, I would like to see her kind of getting lost in it in a way that you’re worried about her doing something questionable on her quest for justice. To see the Achilles heel of Bex, and to see her fall apart and do it wrong – or to see someone profile her and kind of realize that she’s maybe a bit more messed up than she lets on.”
Clearly, what drives Henderson on The Hunting Party is a sense of vengeance that will never be sated. But what drives Roxburgh, after so many years spent grueling in the hunt for superstardom?
“Me, as Melissa, I realize I’ve put up a bunch of walls, and it’s not helped with having real connection with people,” reflects Roxburgh. “I do see a bit of a mirror in Bex with that as well. Because of everything she’s gone through, she’s so tough. We have to see her slowly let people in, and trust people, and form actual connections with people, as opposed to just work jargon. She’s kind of taught me that none of the tough matters if you’re going home to an empty house. None of it matters if you’re not adding the things back into your life that makes you soft again.”
Photographer: Alexandra Arnold
Makeup: Arielle Arnold
Creative direction: Melissa Roxburgh
Styling: Melissa Roxburgh
Show Stills By: David Astorga/Nbc
