Cooped up
Jing Lusi and Martin Compston tell DQ about partnering for the second season of ITV thriller Red Eye, bonding over cups of tea and raising the stakes of a series built on conspiracy and claustrophobia.
When the first season of ITV thriller Red Eye debuted in 2024, it told a specific story that largely unfolded within the passenger cabin of an all-night flight from London to Beijing.
Yet even before filming began on the series, star Jing Lusi sat down with the show’s producers from Bad Wolf to discuss what the future of the series might look like.
“They were like, ‘Oh, there could be a different kind of moving vehicle every season,’ like Speed,” the actor tells DQ. But in the meantime, the BBC released train-bound drama Nightsleeper, while Apple TV’s Hijack is moving from its own plane setting in season one to a train in the upcoming second season.
Deciding a second season of Red Eye couldn’t also unfold aboard a train, the creative team began to consider what the identity of the show was. “And it was really interesting going from season one to season two, and finding that,” Lusi continues. “I think it’s become [about a] confined space. And then something happens that you think is really simple – like someone’s died, maybe it’s just a heart attack – but as you dig a bit deeper, you uncover this insane global conspiracy, which is fascinating because it brings in so many parts.”
S2, which debuts on ITV on New Year’s Day, subsequently found its confined space in the form of the US embassy in London.
“They found another way to keep everybody in complete lockdown,” jokes Line of Duty star Martin Compston, who joins Lusi for S2. “The American embassy is certainly one where, although it’s in the UK, we don’t know what’s happening in there. There’s a whole other world going on in there. And so we get in there and then shut the outside world out. It was a great set.”
Following the discovery of a dead courier at Heathrow Airport, the story heads inside the embassy, where celebrations for a newly appointed US ambassador to London are cut short after a call – threatening to blow a British plane out of the sky if anyone leaves – triggers an immediate embassy lockdown.
Among the guests and staff trapped inside is Lusi’s DS Hana Li, a British cop who must join forces with head of embassy security Clay Brody (Compston) to investigate an increasing number of murders and stop the bombers, who have a British government jet in their sights. The passengers on board include director general Madeline Delaney (Lesley Sharp).
After the events of S1, “if it was me, I’d probably have some therapy, but I don’t think she did,” Lusi says of her character. “You see her working on her birthday, so obviously she’s someone who just channels everything into work. The experience of season one has probably made her more suspicious, if anything, and to not take things at face value.
“In season one, she could have just left it as, ‘Oh, it’s bad food poisoning [on the plane], people are dying, and it’s all kind of unrelated.’ But because then she went further to then see that this is a global conspiracy, now having a death at the beginning and for her to be like, ‘Actually, no, I’m going to probe further, and I’m going to go to the embassy,’ that’s more interesting. Season one’s probably made her a bit more of someone with a bone.”
“It’s really refreshing,” Compston says of Hana’s approach to her work. “It’s important when people go through things and they need to talk about it. But it’s also nice to see somebody who just says ‘fuck it’ and keeps getting up and coming back for more. Some people are just like that, just built different. I’m sure talking would help at some point, but it’s not in their nature. We’re just gonna deal with things better solo. It was quite good to see.”
Compston describes Hana and Brody as a pair of lone wolves who are forced to work together against their better judgement – the pair have a chequered past after Brody “screwed over” Hana. But in the beginning, locked in the embassy, she needs him more than he needs her.
“We’re in a society where independence is really rewarded, and actually, it takes away from the fact that we are very social creatures, and we do need help, and it’s OK to ask for help,” Compston says. “That’s what was really nice to see – to see them both be these very isolated people, but then realise that they need each other and actually benefit from it.”
Compston had been a fan of Red Eye S1, tuning into the series to watch the work of his director friend Kieron Hawkes (Power Book IV, Fortitude), who helmed all six episodes and returns to direct the first half of S2. Camilla Strøm Henriksen (Grace, The Suspect) picks up episodes 4-6.
He was watching it to support his friend, and then fell in love with the show. “It was a big, exciting, thrilling show. To actually be part of it was wonderful,” he says.
“The experience of it was amazing,” says Lusi. “I had such a good time making the first season and also the second season. And when you have an amazing experience during the filming, that’s such a gift. Then when it does well, you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s such a bonus.’ To have the two things, you can’t really ask for more as an actor. It’s the best of both worlds. It’s the winning formula.”
Distributed by Sony Pictures Television and with scripts once again written by series creator Peter A Dowling (Flightplan), the show finished filming at the end of May after a former Speedo factory was transformed into the show’s US embassy setting. Scenes inside the embassy car park were also filmed in the car park beneath Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, with Compston and Lusi enjoying a tour of the football ground that included walking out on the pitch.
“I’ve never been on a stadium tour before. It was amazing,” says Lusi. “We were needed back on set and we had some assistant directors with us, and their phones and radios were buzzing. I was like, ‘Just turn it off. This is so fun.’
“The embassy [set] was our studio. I like it like that. I love being locked in one place. I know every actor’s like, ‘Location is great.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s great.’ But then you don’t know where the toilets are. You don’t know what the wind is gonna do. It might rain. As an actor, I think you can do your job better [in a studio environment] because when you don’t have a gale-force wind in your hair and you don’t have to walk 20 minutes to go to the toilet, you can just focus on your job.”
With a high level of animosity and distrust between Hana and Brody from the outset, Lusi and Compston prepared for the series by talking through the scripts together with “lots of cups of tea.” Though there wasn’t time for lots of rehearsal – as is usually the case on a television set – “as an actor, you need to be on the same wavelength of what you’re reacting to, what happened and who was in the wrong,” says Compston. “But we just get together, sit in a dressing room and chat about it.”
“For me, it’s like an iceberg, where the things you see on screen or the things we read in the script are such a small percentage of the world of your character or the world of your show. You’re just seeing them in such a snapshot of time,” Lusi says. “Luckily for me, I can learn lines relatively easily, so my prep is usually, ‘Who is she? What’s the character? Where has she been?’
“We also shoot very quickly. You need to know exactly where you’ve been, and we’re shooting out of sequence. Then also in this season, particularly for me, the most important thing was to get that relationship with Martin’s character [right], to know specifically what it was. They [the producers] were like, ‘Oh, something happened in the past.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, but what?’ Once you get all of the stuff underneath the iceberg, once you’ve got all of that down, then you can have a bit more of a smooth sailing when it comes to filming.”
Hana is also shown taking part in some rigorous boxing training early in the season, though Lusi admits she’s “not very physical” in real life, unlike Compston. “I love to be quite a non-moving, sedentary person,” she jokes. “Luckily in Red Eye, it’s in quite short bursts. If they had me running all the time, I would probably need to get more in shape for it. We filmed on the fourth floor [of the embassy location] and there was one working lift, and sometimes it didn’t really work. Martin just took the stairs every time.”
In fact, Compston and Hawkes would train and spar a little in the evenings, with the actor crediting his director friend with introducing him to Israeli martial art Krav Maga.
“When you have a brilliant stunt coordinator and you get quite handy off camera, then you can start to suggest things you’re good at [to try on set], but we had amazing stunt people, and there’s a reason they do their job. If one of us breaks our ankles, we wreck the show. We have to make sure we keep safe so we can come and film the next day. So as much as I can do, I love it.
“I loved Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones. But a thing he said that stuck with me is if you don’t see what the actor’s going through in their face, and it cuts to the wide shot [with stunt doubles], you do lose something. If you can see the actor going through what the character is going through then it really involves you in it. So I try to immerse myself in that as much as I can. That’s the fun part, getting to believe that you’re this ‘super army soldier,’” he says, quoting Ross Kemp in Extras. “Getting to believe in your head you’re an SAS guy for a while, it’s brilliant.”
Compston also leaned into his security boss role, with Brody constantly touching his earpiece or speaking into the microphone in his jacket cuff. “Just enjoy it, I don’t overthink it,” he says. “It’s great fun. It wasn’t the most comfortable [the earpiece] so a couple of times, when it [the camera] wasn’t on me, I would take it out, and then a couple of times, they swing the camera around and I’d be trying to get it back in. I live for all that stuff. It’s the fun part of this job. You’re playing a spy.”
Lusi is now filming a role in Steven Moffat’s Channel 4 political drama Number 10, while Compston will be rejoining AC-12 in spring next year for the seventh season of Jed Mercurio’s hit police corruption drama Line of Duty.
Before then, Red Eye S2 tells a story where “everybody’s not who they seem to be,” Compston teases.
“Later in the series, it will reveal how these slightly unconnected events are actually really connected,” Lusi says. “You get the emotional payoff as well, especially with Martin’s character. It packs an emotional punch at the end, which I love about Red Eye, because it’s all very action until there is a little bit of a heart tug at the end.”
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tagged in: Bad Wolf, ITV, Jing Lusi, Martin Compston, Red Eye, Sony Pictures Television