Morena Baccarin: Cop and criminal can't exist without each other in 'Endgame'

NEW YORK Feb. 21 (UPI) -- Gotham and Firefly alum Morena Baccarin says a cat-and-mouse game played by two brilliant, capable people is what makes her new NBC thriller, The Endgame, tick.

Set to debut Monday, the series follows Baccarin's Ukrainian criminal mastermind Elena as she is captured in New York and interrogated by Ryan Michelle Bathe's FBI agent Val while her minions are emptying out banks all over the city.

"It's really a two-person-driven show. We cannot exist without each other on this one, and it's fun to be No. 1 on the call sheet, but the work is definitely not all on me," Baccarin told reporters in a recent Zoom interview.

The actress said she is always intrigued by the idea of playing somebody a "little out there" and the fashion-forward international arms dealer Elena fits the bill.

"This character is definitely not a caricature, but larger than life, and she has the high, high stakes that really attracted me to it," Baccarin explained.

"And I love the idea of a show about two women that is not about it being about two women, that is a show that is centered around these people that happen to be women and that are only opposite sides of 'good and bad,' but really ultimately are after the same thing."

Baccarin sees Elena as more of a vigilante than a heartless evildoer.

"She is fighting for a good cause, and any good villain has real reasons to be doing what they are doing," the actress noted.

"By the end of the pilot, and certainly by the end of the second episode, if you are not rooting for her, or rooting for both of these characters, both of these women, then I think we've done something very wrong."

Viewers will learn about what drives Elena in flashback scenes throughout the season.

"It was, like, solidifying that backstory for me and what motivates her actions," she said.

"It is very much a delicious part of being the audience to a show like this, getting to sort of like live in her shoes. However, it also has to be grounded in reality and not get too broad and too crazy. So, I feel like I'm constantly, like, 'Is this too much?' or 'How far can I take this?' and 'Am I getting boring?'"

Show co-creator Nick Wootton said the show starts out looking like there is a bad guy and a good guy.

"What you see as the series goes on, and what I think we also explore a lot with Ryan's character, with the Val character, is this sort of gray area."

"There's sort of a gradual shift over this 10-day period of time. So, it is sort of challenging, starting in one place and ending in a possibly very different one."

Wootton thinks the show's "rob from the rich, give to the poor" theme will resonate with audience members in a time when many feel disenfranchised by the current political, social and economic systems.

"What's going on in the world has certainly informed the way that the show will unfold over these episodes," the writer-producer said.

"The thing that we are really exploring more than the Robin Hood aspect, which is certainly part of it, is the idea of corruption in plain sight," he added. "We see some institutions as being Ivory Tower, kind of, unbreakable. But then, when you look a little closer, there are flaws."

The biggest challenge of playing Elena was getting her speech patterns right.

"It's not an accent I've done before, and it's been a lot of fun to create this part," Baccarin noted. "Ultimately, we felt like it was very key to who this character was. The action stuff falls on Ryan."

Another key ingredient to the Elena brew was her clothing. The premiere episode shows her emerging from a prison truck into a bunker, wearing a stunning, low-cut, blue ball gown.

"We were having a little bit of difficulty just finding the exact look," Baccarin recalled.

"It's very complicated because you want that 'Wow' moment of, like, she's coming out of this box in a dress, and it's, like, 'What the heck is she doing in a dress?' And, you know, as an actor, I was trying to rationalize that to death. And then we realized that we want her to look really fantastic."

Baccarin looked at between 40 and 50 dresses before finding the perfect one at Carolina Herrera's Manhattan boutique on the way to a doctor's appointment.

"It was pretty clear from the moment I put it on that this was very much what you wanted to have when you saw her coming out of a box," Baccarin said.

"Now, I'm stuck with this dress forever."