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Hanna
Amazon’s new series Hanna is obviously a bold reboot of Joe Wright’s 2011 film of the same name. The central concept is the same: a rogue assassin tries to fake his own death to raise his daughter alone in the wild, where he molds her into a super killer and trains her for a deadly mission she doesn’t quite understand. Chasing them is a rogue secret agent. The Easter Egg-like twist in the new series is that the father, Erik Heller, and the rogue agent, Marissa Wiegler, are played by The Killing co-stars Joel Kinnaman and Mireille Enos.
“Actually, that was just a happy — not accident, but it’s so rare that people happen to be on the list of the creators and happen to be available and happen to love working with another as much as we do,” Enos told a roundtable of reporters during Winter TCA. “So, it kind of just unfolded, it wasn’t complete before signing on.”
Writer and producer David Farr confirmed this. “Not at all. Mireille, we got you first. I remember saying, ‘Joel is on the list,’ and watching the look in Mireille’s eyes…as in…’That’s okay.'”
Enos was well aware that fans of The Killing, where she and Kinnaman shot to fame playing partners solving a haunting murder, would be taken aback by their creepy dynamic in Hanna, where they are deadly enemies.
Enos said, “It wouldn’t be as fun trying to replay the same dynamic, especially since The Killing was so special for both of us. But it’s so delicious, this idea of now being enemies.”
Even though our first glimpse of Enos’s Marissa Wiegler is rather terrifying — she’s hunting Kinnaman and his wife and the baby via a helicopter — we next see her as a married mother living in Paris. It’s hard to figure out if she’s truly villainous or something more complicated. Enos said she liked this.
“Structurally, she is introduced very slowly. I think for that reason, to keep the ambiguity around who she really is,” Enos said. “But for me, what’s interesting about this, is that there’s a lot of room to create empathy for this woman, even though she’s in the antagonist position.”
“She’s done terrible things and I think we’re both interested in a character who has done terrible things and put herself in a box, psychologically, and then recreated herself as one of us, as a normal person with a partner and sort of a kid and a life in a city — which is interesting because it’s not her own country, so there’s some element of hiding,” Farr said. “Then, the past comes back literally out of the forest, which is of course in a psychoanalytical sense, that sense that all of us have pasts in some forest, somewhere.”
Enos said, “It has to be something she wants really badly to have waited fourteen or fifteen years and still be hunting in fourteen or fifteen years. I think her hope was that it would never come back, that it had been taken care of and it was gone forever.”
“It’s everyone’s nightmare,” said Farr.
Hanna is now streaming on Prime Video.
