Advertisement

Esme Creed-Miles: Assassin 'completes coming-of-age journey' in 'Hanna' S3

Esme Creed-Miles stars as "Hanna" in the Amazon Prime Video drama. Photo courtesy of Amazon
1 of 5 | Esme Creed-Miles stars as "Hanna" in the Amazon Prime Video drama. Photo courtesy of Amazon

NEW YORK, Nov. 24 (UPI) -- Esme Creed-Miles says her titular heroine gets a satisfying conclusion in the third and final season of her espionage thriller Hanna, which began streaming on Amazon Prime Video Wednesday.

"This is the first time we are seeing the way Hanna interacts with the other trainees and Marissa and her new love interest," Creed-Miles told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.

Advertisement

"She has this confidence and this sense of self that she hasn't had before, which was fun to play and feels more mature and completes her coming-of-age journey."

The saga starts in Season 1 when Hanna is rescued as a baby from a CIA site where her DNA had been enhanced to make her a future super-soldier, then raised by her adoptive father in isolation in a forest in Poland.

Now, 20, Hanna is on the run from various shadowy government agencies that want to eliminate her, as well as several outspoken and influential young people around the world.

Advertisement

The show co-stars Mireille Enos as Marissa, the agent who started out hunting Hanna, but who ends up helping her; Dermot Mulroney as John Carmichael, head of the super-soldier genetics and training programs; and Ray Liotta as the puppet master to whom all the characters answer.

"While Hanna is getting more confident and more fully formed as a human, Marissa is at this moment in her journey where she needs to deconstruct, to deal with her origins story and how she got there and the pain connected to that and use all of that to deliver Hanna to a nicer life," Enos explained.

Although they grew up in vastly different circumstances, Hanna's and Marissa's lives and careers are shaped by the men who raised them.

"Both of us started out as lovely, little, clean-slate girls and we were both put on this training path to become soldiers and weapons and we didn't have a lot of say in that," Enos said.

She added: "In some ways, that gave us incredible skills, a capacity to control our world. We're very efficient. We are very capable. It's not like it's all negative, but we weren't given an option."

Creed-Miles said she finds real-life violence disempowering and traumatic because it disrupts or prevents falling in love, having a family and feeling connected to other people.

Advertisement

"They haven't really been given much in terms of having an emotionally fulfilling existence," the actress said of Hanna and Marissa.

When asked what keeps these women going when it seems like everyone and everything is working against them, Enos said "stubbornness."

"And a very deep sense of survival," she laughed.

Mulroney said in a separate Zoom call that he has enjoyed playing John Carmichael because he is a dynamic character whose motives aren't always clear.

"Still at the Meadows, where I trained all of those young female assassins, but in completely different circumstances," Mulroney said about where viewers will find him in Season 3.

"I'm now being coerced by Marissa and her henchman Hanna to cause me to bring down my own program. From the very beginning, John is on the hot plate, but you'd never know it because he is a trained spy. He lies and manipulates and plays his cards close to his chest."

Carmichael is also a "company man," driven by power and the need to complete his objectives, Mulroney said.

"He's not the top dog. They bring in Ray Liotta to play the chairman of UTRAX, so you understand even further how important it is for Carmichael to succeed," he added.

Advertisement

"Behind that steely exterior, what an ego he has about how well the program is functioning! After all, he never expected Hanna to emerge from the wilderness as a perfectly formed, wolf DNA-dosed assassin."

Hanna creator David Farr said in another video-conference that he felt he had all the time he needed to tell the story he wanted to over the course of three seasons.

"We wanted to honor the journey of Hanna the character from childhood right through to her becoming a woman," Farr said. "That was always the arc and it seems kind of logical to put that into a three-act structure."

Season 3 finds Hanna caring about other people in a way she never has before.

"She's thinking about this man who she is profoundly attracted to, but who brings all sorts of responsibilities that he has into her life and that creates complexity," he said.

"And it's about Marissa, who is not quite as reliable as a protector as she was and it's even about the whole generation of young, radical thinkers that UTRAX is targeting."

Advertisement

Latest Headlines