How war’s darkest stories helped inform Castle star’s confronting role

Former Castle star Stana Katic looked into the very worst that humans are capable of towards each other when preparing for her role in drama Absentia.

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The very clear line between good and evil is what television audiences once thrived on, but actor Stana Katic believes viewers are now far more interested in a new murky grey than the old black and white.

The former Castle star, who now appears in the dark Amazon Prime Video thriller Absentia, thinks the rise of the anti-hero is a response to the current state of the world and a need for more relatable protagonists.

Stana Katic as Emily Byrne in Absentia with Patrick McAuley as her son Flynn. Picture: Amazon Prime Video

“People are looking for experiences that are more reflective of the world we live in and the world that we live in often isn’t as black and white as maybe some stories way back in the past were,” Katic tells Insider.

“The bad guy was very clearly the bad guy and the good guy was very clearly the good guy. The white hat and black hat thing may not resonate as much with audiences today as it possibly did in the past.”

Katic plays Emily Byrne, an FBI agent who was abducted and presumed dead before being found alive six years later. Her husband has remarried and her son, who was three at the time of her disappearance, doesn’t remember her.

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The show’s first season follows Byrne as she struggles to reclaim her life and then clear her name as she soon becomes the prime suspect in a number of murders. Season two, which has just dropped, sees her on the trail of a serial killer while still struggling with post-traumatic stress after her years in captivity.

Byrne is not your cookie-cutter FBI agent. She doesn’t dress in crisp outfits and she certainly doesn’t obey every command from her superior officers. She’s damaged, dangerous and often works in a decidedly grey area of the law.

It is this type of character Katic believes audiences want to barrack for?

Katic’s Byrne is a dark, totured character. Picture: Amazon Prime Video

“Superman was a wonderful story when it came out, however Superman is very much on the right side of the law always,” Katic says. “It’s only in modern times that we’ve moved into this sort of taste which is that we want to take a look at people who are sometimes riding a very grey line between morality and amorality and who have those questions come up for themselves and maybe who sometimes don’t even blink at a moment of an amoral decision.”

This stark transformation
has evolved over the past decade or so and Katic points to some popular characters with whom audiences have become enamoured — characters
who would never have fitted
the bill before.

“We are in that era of Walter White, Tony Soprano, Thomas Shelby and so on, where a lot of characters that audiences are drawn to do have very much a dark side,” she says. “In my experience of the world, we all have shadows and I think that’s very true of humanity so I guess our audience is more expectant of that experience and reflection.”

The star shot to fame during eight seasons of Castle alongside Nathan Fillion.

In such a highly connected world where horror stories are but a click away, people increasingly expect their TV shows to better resemble the environment in which they live.

“I feel like we have so much information out there and we can find a lot of grey in the world so I think audiences are looking at it from that sort of a spectrum these days,” she says. “It’s a modern taste ultimately and that’s an interesting exploration.”

Absentia is a very different beast to the much lighter Castle, where Katic played homicide detective Kate Beckett for eight seasons.

The two characters, while sharing similar law enforcement careers, are like chalk and cheese.

It was this difference that attracted Katic, who is also an executive producer of the show, to play Emily.

“One of the things I was excited about when I took this project on was that
this character is truly an
anti-hero,” she says.

Transitioning into such a raw and complex persona was an intense exercise and Katic looked to some dark places for insight into survivor mentality.

“A story or research that resonated with me was Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning which is a story about how people survived the experiences of World War II, especially the camps,” she says. “It was a really interesting look into the very worst that humans are capable of towards each other and that was something we all needed to dive into with eyes wide open in order to tell a believable story about a character who’s gone through something as extreme
as Emily has.”

Absentia Season 2 now streaming on Amazon Prime Video

Originally published as How war’s darkest stories helped inform Castle star’s confronting role