The Blacklist: Redemption is upon us, much to the disbelief of its star.
"Never happen—that was my first thought. Like, ‘Nice thought, I would love to explore this character more…' but I didn't think it would ever come to reality," Ryan Eggold told E! News. "It's fun, it's a lot of work."
For Eggold, a chance to get to know his Blacklist character Tom Keen even more was a chance too good to turn up—especially since his character was slated to die in the pilot and then at the end of The Blacklist season one. "I told the Johns [executive producers], I said, ‘Thank you guys for always trying to kill me at every chance, every possible opportunity," he said. "They wrote a really interesting character and I found a lot of fun sides to try to explore with it."
Tom's had a sordid past, he was an orphan, killed (but clearly not), trained his whole life to be a spy… "There's all this mixed up stuff that's fun to explore," he said.
Some of that mixed up stuff includes his relationship with Scottie (Famke Janssen), the mother he never knew. And he's the son she doesn't know about. Scottie is the president of Halcyon Aegis, a private military company with teams of operatives. Eggold's character is going in undercover to investigate Scottie and what exactly is the truth with her and the company, while hiding his truth from her. You know, typical Blacklist stuff, average mother and son relationship.
"We're really our own show," Janssen said. "It's very much more of a spy show, it's fun, it's thrilling, it's very international…There's the parent-child unknown situation here."
It's a bunch of mercenaries thrown together, so trust levels aren't too high here. "You're dealing with people who take on very morally ambiguous jobs," she said. "So they're not the most trustworthy people to begin with."
The Blacklist: Redemption kicks off on Thursday, Feb. 23 at 10 p.m. on NBC.
(E! and NBC are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)