‘Hijack’ Creators Break Down Intense Finale And Series’ Biggest Twists: “You Want To Be Leonardo DiCaprio Pointing At The Screen”

When the end credits roll on a TV thriller and I’m sorting through my emotions, I look back at my notes to see real-time reactions in their rawest form. Oftentimes, the messier the notes, the more I liked the series. And much like Severance and Silo before it, my notes on Apple TV+’s latest high-octane thriller, Hijack, were full of all-caps yelling, wild expletives, an abundance of question marks and exclamation points, and random mashups of letters — the result of stress-induced keyboard slams. Simply put, Hijack was a success. And co-creators George Kay and Jim Field Smith spoke with Decider about crafting the incredibly sharp, stressful, suspenseful ride.

The ambitious seven-episode series stars Idris Elba as Sam Nelson, an expert negotiator with the gift of gab who finds himself fighting for his life on a hijacked flight. In the seven hours it takes to fly from Dubai to London, Hijack uses real-time storytelling to show Sam and his fellow passengers challenging the hijackers, while on-the-ground officials scramble to avoid international tragedy. A relentless string of twists and turns builds up to an intense finale, during which Hijack reveals the answers to long-held questions and the unexpected fate of Flight KA29.

“We really wanted people to be able to go back and watch the show again, and see where and how we’ve managed to sort of make it watertight, but also see where those little Easter eggs, or those little winks to the eventual storyline were,” Field Smith, who also directs the series and serves as an EP (alongside Kay, Elba, Jamie Laurenson, Hakan Kousetta, and Kris Thykier) said.

In a Zoom call with Decider ahead of Hijack‘s finale, Field Smith and Kay (who writes the series) broke down some of Episode 7’s biggest moments, unpacked that jaw-dropping scene in Episode 6, spoke on the show’s stellar soundtrack, discussed a potential Season 2, and much more.

Decider: Let’s dive right into what fans are racking their brains over…that Episode 6 cliffhanger.

George Kay: Well you know, in the penultimate episode of a thriller you have to do something special, and you hope all along to bury your clues to that as much as you can, but not so well that you don’t feel like the audience has noticed that character along the way. So if you look at the opening episode, the first conversation Idris has after the hijacking started is with Amanda, and if you look at the moment where Alec comes through with the guns in the bag in the security check, you know, make sure to put Amanda also going through at that moment. So the whole thing is threaded through. And one of the things I was keen to write all the time through the episodes between then and the twist was just how anxious Amanda was and just how much she was looking at the screen and being stressed out by the whole thing, knowing all the while that her stress was to do with the fact that she may be needed to take over the hijacking at some point. And that the kind of stress manifests itself in the same way as the stress you’d feel if you’re actually being hijacked. So it was free seeding for that twist. And Jim directed it really well. And also I mean in terms of casting on Holly, Holly Aird was a very well known actress. Still is well known, but is a very, very good actress. And so she was as well known as we dared make that character in terms of casting, because you don’t want to see a world where a super famous actress is sitting there doing nothing for six episodes, because that also gives it away. So that’s got to be factored into it. So that’s Amy Hubbard, our casting director. And all of these things go into making that moment and earning it, so it’s great that you appreciate it.

I rewatched the series, and going back, it’s so enlightening to see the subtle little hints you give us. I was like that meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen when I saw Amanda walking onto the plane ahead of Sam. Like, “They told me the whole time!”

Jim Field Smith: The moment in Episode 1 when the golfers who are sitting in business class are sort of threatening to rise up and Sam is telling them to think twice — one of the golfers says, “I’m not just gonna sit here while they crash this plane into some capital city.” And one of the fun things in the edit, as much as George threaded so much of this stuff through the scripts, you get to this point where you’ve shot all this material. And you can start to find even more moments of satisfying little seeds for that character. So we really wanted people to be able to go back, and watch the show again, and see where and how we’ve managed to sort of make it watertight — but also to see where those little Easter eggs or those little winks to the eventual storyline were. Of course, that moment blows past you when it happens, but on a second viewing, as you said, you want to be Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen.

Moving to the finale, I wanted to ask about the landing scene, because it really transforms this set we’ve spent all season with. What was it like constructing that pivotal sequence?

Field Smith: It was fun. What’s interesting about the show is that the plane takes off from Dubai and flies to London, and of course, the hijackers’ whole plan is that no one on the ground knows the plane has been hijacked. So we essentially had a plane that takes off and flies to 35,000 feet and then doesn’t do much sort of dynamically during that time. So it was really enjoyable for everybody when we came to shoot the material for Episode 7, to actually start to see the plane in different states of being, because we were so used to six months shooting with it in the state that you see for most of the show. I think everyone really relished the opportunity to shoot the sequences where the plane lands, but also to shoot the sequence after it lands when Stuart and Sam are alone in the crash hulk of the plane. It was a lot of fun to create that environment and to imagine, with a little bit of creativity, how it might change. Because that’s the precinct that we’ve spent the last six hours in, and we wanted to finish out the show in that same precinct. We wanted to give it a kind of a darker, more hellish twist. Sam’s sort of locked in there, and it’s basically a fight to the death. So I was trying to make it as nightmarish as possible.

You did! Speaking of that scene, I love that after seven hours of molar-cracking tension that dramatic emergency landing was still too simple to end on. You had to give us that final twist between Sam and Stuart. And Idris and Neil have such amazing chemistry throughout the series.

Field Smith: Yeah, I think because Stuart gets kind of emasculated at the top of Episode 7. He gets disarmed. Amanda stormed the cockpit, and Stewart — the so-called head of the hijackers — is basically completely disempowered. We didn’t want to end the show without a sort of a well-earned face-off between the two people who had been sort of at each other’s throats and in each other’s faces throughout the show. And of course, there are moments earlier in the series where Stuart is really, really vial to Sam, one in particular in Episode 3 where he threatens to hit him, he doesn’t hit him, and he forces him to smile. It’s a really, really demeaning scene with some pretty nasty undertones to it. And we wanted to make sure that had a sort of pay off in Episode 7. We wanted the audience, and for us, to see these two characters sharing the same space in the finale and see Sam finally get to have his moment.

Well that moment — when Sam says “Say cheese” back to Stuart after he’s been cornered by authorities — is one of the most iconic final lines in a series. And then “The Dark End of the Street” by James Carr plays us out. How did you decide on that final song, and can you speak to the unique end credits music throughout the series?

Field Smith: That song, “Dark End of the Street,” speaks to where Sam sort of got to mentally as a character by the end of the series. It’s about him sort of making peace with things, particularly in his relationship with Marsha… It’s a really intense show, and it has to be — partly because it’s real time, but also because it’s a hijack thriller. And so we wanted people to breathe out at the end of every episode. And I wanted the music for the show to be kind of slightly timeless, which is why a lot of the music is kind of in that Motown space. I didn’t want it to be like, “Oh, here’s some insanely contemporary track, which in six months time is going to be really dated.” And I wanted the lyrics and this sort of soulfulness of the songs to speak to where Sam was at as a character throughout the series as he evolves.

Kay: There’s also the “3 Degrees” episode, which was all about the track “When Will I See You Again,” which — I can’t remember if it was “When Will I See You Again” came first or the idea to move to the route of the plane three degrees, but that sort of accidentally put us into a Motown [space].

Field Smith: You’re right. That song was scripted and featured in that episode, and that did actually inform the choices elsewhere, for sure. We hadn’t originally intended for there to be any sort of music playing out of the credits. And in Episode 6 we deliberately didn’t have a song on the credits, because we just wanted the shock of the twist to land and for it to be so naked. But music is an incredibly powerful tool when you make a show and Anne Nikitin’s score is so intense and so fragile in places, and tense and suspenseful. We felt that we needed to kind of breathe out at the end of every episode and sort of get you ready for the next one.

I understand why it would make sense for Hijack to be a limited series, but you guys are so good at this and I’m not ready to stop watching Idris Elba play Sam. So is there any potential for a Season 2? I don’t think he should be in another hijack, like we don’t have to go the Prison Break route where Michael just keeps breaking out of more prisons —

Kay: Is that what happened on that show? I only watched the first season.

Oh no, I’m sorry! The first season was phenomenal. But yeah, he ends up breaking out of like three other prisons, it was mind-blowing. [Laughs] But I wouldn’t mind Sam getting called in to help negotiate or defuse some other high-stakes situations.

Field Smith: There’s lots of stuff that — for as much as the series tries to answer its own questions that it sets up within itself as a limited series — I think there’s room for that character, you know, for sure ongoing. And there are things that are unanswered from Season 1. So we don’t know at the minute. We’re just enjoying the show.

Kay: The appropriate answer is it’s up in the air.

Love that. I mean, he looked genuinely exhausted in that final scene.

Kay: Yeah he needs a break. Whatever happens, he needs a break. We can maybe get Prison Break Season 7. [Laughs]

Field Smith: If there was a Season 2, I don’t think it’ll start one second after the end of Season 1.

Maybe he just brings that jewelry home to his wife and retires.

Kay: Yeah, a real-time lie-down. [Laughs]

Well, Idris is superb from the very first to the very last scene. Looking back on the series, what made him the perfect person to play Sam?

Field Smith: We felt very early on it was going to be a really good fit for him. But until you start shooting, you don’t really know how that character is going to come across on camera. You’ve got a really well-written character on the page. You’ve got a really good actor. But it’s not really until you get all of the elements together that you know 100% quite how it’s going to work. How is Sam Nelson going to convince people to do things that they may not otherwise want to do? Will he be able to change their mind? That’s his skill. And that can come through as being really verbose or really manipulating and scheming. And I think what was really interesting was when we started shooting, we realized that actually a lot of it with Idris is down to his charm and his physical presence. I kept imagining him as a sort of planet that everyone else kind of orbits around. And in the show, he has a real stillness and we leaned more and more into him watching and listening all the time. And he doesn’t need to say much, he just needs to say the right thing at the right time.

What he’s very good at is physically moving into the same space as somebody and just very quietly saying, “Have you thought about this?” And actually that became really, really powerful. We found when we were editing the show that we wanted to constantly check in with Sam, even if it was a scene that Sam is not in — we constantly wanted to understand where Sam was and whether Sam was listening, or watching, or even just thinking. That’s the power of Idris. He has a very, very magnetic draw to him. That’s what I mean about him being a planet. He almost has his own gravity. And so I found myself with the camera sort of leaning into him and wanting to get right into his head. So I think that was the real revelation for us as we were shooting — just sort of leaning into his gravity as it were. His orbit.

I know one of the things you did to capture the feeling of tension is to recreate a real plane and not alter the set when filming to create that realistic claustrophobic feeling. What was the most challenging scene to film?

Field Smith: The biggest challenge was that final episode, because as I said, the plane takes off from Dubai and then it’s largely kind of static in the sky at 35,000 feet. Actually, that’s a relatively simple illusion to pull off with lighting. We had an incredibly complicated setup, but once we figured out how to do it, that worked really well for 90% of the show. The problem came with the script that George wrote for Episode 7. We had to essentially crash land this plane with 200 people in it believably, and then we had to have this end sequence on a crashed plane. And so all while we were shooting, we had this in the back of our heads about how we were going to do that. So we mounted the cockpit on a motorized gimbal so we could kind of throw the cockpit around quite a bit, because we knew that’s where a lot of the action would take place. And then I think the good thing about a TV show like this, where you’ve spent seven hours with these characters, is actually in a crash sequence, what you care about is the characters. If it was a movie crash sequence, it becomes all about the spectacle of the crash. And we wanted to deliver that as well, but the difference here was I was able to really lean into the characters that we’ve invested all this time and energy in, so a shot of the family and the back of the plane all holding hands and the mom saying “It’s going to be OK, it’s going to be OK” is as powerful as a really complicated visual effects sequence. You can lean into those moments and those characters and not rely on the spectacle of it so much, and hopefully we did both.

Definitely. I think this show was also surprising because in a lot of hijacking or even hostage situations on screen the big focus is often the evil of humanity or like the despair or hopelessness of the people experiencing it. But throughout Hijack there was such a strong focus on humanity and family and what we’re willing to do to protect loved ones, or even strangers, as people capable of accessing empathy.

Kay: It’s really important to have characters with heart. Otherwise, you’ve got no irony. You’ve got nowhere to go emotionally. The more you can invest in that the better the outcomes; the quicker it is to achieve those character outcomes as well. Very early on I was drawn to the plane because in England, we’ve got this class system. It’s the same in terms of status in the states in terms of money and stuff, but what it becomes is a kind of community show. There’s people from all walks of life on a plane, people with money or people without money or different status, different lives. But what you see the characters do at the beginning is they’re all they’re out for themselves, arguing about the lockers above their heads for storing luggage. By the end, some of them are still arguing about the luggage, but essentially, it’s a community pulling together. That’s why the priest was there, just for that one [scene]. Sort of reverse engineered so the priest could kind of call his people together, even if it’s in a secular way, just to say, “Look, we’ve done this, we’re nearly here. We’ve done this together. We’ve survived as a group.” So it goes from an individual show to a group show.

Hijack is now streaming on Apple TV+.