Note: This article contains spoilers from “Lucky” Episodes 1 and 2.
“Lucky” does not waste much time.
It is at the 10-minute mark of its premiere that the show’s heroine, Luciana “Lucky” Armstrong (Anya Taylor-Joy), wakes up in her Las Vegas hotel room to find herself abandoned by her husband Cary (Drew Starkey), the millions of dollars they stole gone and the FBI — led by Agent Billie Rand (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) — closing in on her location. The “Lucky” premiere does not let up from there, following Taylor-Joy’s quick-thinking protagonist as she does her best to escape the clutches of her FBI and mob pursuers across 40 relentless minutes.
The episode’s fast pace reflects how the Apple TV series, based on author Marissa Stapley’s best-selling 2021 novel of the same name, came together.
A Hello Sunshine production, “Lucky” began, like several of the company’s past shows and movies, as one of co-founder Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club selections. After reading Stapley’s novel, she immediately recommended it to Hello Sunshine Film & TV President Lauren Neustadter, who shared her enthusiasm for the material. The two quickly landed on Taylor-Joy as their No. 1 choice to play the novel’s eponymous heroine and were later delighted to learn Stapley had also imagined the “Furiosa” and “Queen’s Gambit” star in the role.
“We reached out to Anya. We sent her the book. True to form, she read it very quickly, and she fell in love. And the rest is history,” Neustadter told TheWrap. “She joined us in producing it, and really, we have been in lockstep with her ever since. It’s been an incredibly rewarding, thrilling journey.”
Taylor-Joy was already attached to star and produce when the project landed on the desk of Jonathan Tropper, the TV creator responsible for “Your Friends and Neighbors,” “Banshee” and a number of other, similarly “muscular” genre shows. Tropper was Hello Sunshine’s “first choice” to helm “Lucky.”
“He’s somebody who knows how to put his foot on the gas and take us for a ride,” she explained. “We knew that what we wanted was the perfect blend of this Hello Sunshine heroine, this woman who is the hero of her own story in an unconventional way, but also something that felt really muscular and bold and thrilling in a way that I think was a little bit outside the boundaries of what we had done before. So we wanted to be with someone that we really trusted to take us there, and Tropper felt like the perfect person.”
The writer, who oversaw “Lucky” with co-showrunner Cassie Pappas, was intrigued by the possibility to finally tell an action story in the same vein as his past shows but from a new perspective. “On all my shows, my lead actors have been men,” Tropper noted. “I was very excited to have a female lead for a change.”
“Lucky” marks a major change of pace for Hello Sunshine.
While the company has always focused on bringing female-led stories to life onscreen, it has never before tackled one that is so reliant on the kinds of car chases and action sequences you typically see only in big-screen summer blockbusters. Speaking with TheWrap, Neustadter acknowledged the show’s unique place in Hello Sunshine’s library and said it was “so exciting” to get to venture into such new territory both as a company and as a producer herself.
“It’s something I’ve really not gotten to do before, and it was such a pleasure,” Neustadter said, highlighting the “all-star team” of directors, writers and actors that was assembled to help bring the show to life. “They’re all so good at executing the action but also at uncovering the depth and nuance of each of these characters that are driving this plot forward. It was really a dream team. I was so excited to get to just be a part of it and cheer everybody on, and I feel like I learned so much in the process. It was really wonderful.”
“It’s like the best blockbuster movie of the summer is on Apple TV every week,” she added with a smile.
The action movie potential of “Lucky” is apparent throughout much of its first episode, a 50-minute chase thriller that has barely paused to catch its breath by the time Taylor-Joy’s Luciana is setting fire to a car filled with the dead bodies of some mob enforcers she’s killed in its closing moments. Tropper, for his part, credits Taylor-Joy for the audaciously relentless pace of its opening installment.
“We did have other versions, and Anya was the first one to say, ‘Let’s not slow it down with any set-up.’ It was her who said, ‘Let’s just drop in and go, and we’ll let people figure it out as we go.’ We just fell in love with that idea,” Tropper recalled. “It came from Anya, who has done TV and movies and has an aesthetic all her own. She read one of the versions of the pilot where we did set things up a little more, and her note was, ‘Let’s not do that. Let’s just throw everybody right into it,’ and I think that defined, in some ways, the pace of the whole show.”
Even the series’ second episode, which sees Taylor-Joy’s Lucky hide out in the desert home of an unsuspecting family for much of its runtime, ends with a fiery gas station confrontation between her and Clifton Collins Jr.’s deadly, formidable Dutch, head enforcer for unscrupulous mob queen Priscilla Masterson (Annette Bening). Together, the two episodes give viewers a comprehensive idea of what they can expect from “Lucky” — namely, a lot of action, nearly all of which is anchored in Taylor-Joy’s magnetic star power.
“She’s the most extraordinary actress. She can really do anything,” Neustadter said of Taylor-Joy. “At her core, Lucky has an incredible strength about her, and I think Anya has a similar strength. They’re both incredibly smart. They’re very adaptable. I believe that they could get away with anything they ever tried to do. It was just so obvious all along that Anya was exactly the right person for this role.”
Pappas echoed Neustadter’s praise for the “Lucky” star. “She’s very, very intelligent,” Pappas said. “It was wonderful to watch her play the smartest person in the room when, in real-life, she also might be the smartest person in the room.”
“Whenever she would call me with questions about a scene the night before or when I’d come into her trailer on the day, they were always very smart questions and they always led us somewhere better,” Pappas said. “I started to really respect her taste, whether it was about music or wardrobe or anything. She’d come in some days and be like, ‘I had a dream last night, and I think [Lucky] should have this tattoo.’ Those suggestions really built her character into this three-dimensional person.”
Viewers start to get a sense of that three-dimensionality in “Lucky’s” first two episodes. But they should look forward to seeing more layers of Taylor-Joy’s protagonist be peeled back over the course of the show’s remaining five installments, which continue to reveal parts of herself she has long buried, as well as force her to make difficult decisions that fundamentally alter her position and her view of herself.
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That balance between high-octane action thriller and intimate character study is what appealed to Tropper about “Lucky” all along.
“I don’t want to say action is easy, but it’s a lot easier than character,” Tropper said with a laugh. “We devoted a lot of our time to saying, ‘Where is Lucky in her journey in this episode? What is she experiencing?’ And then we would earn each action sequence by knowing where we needed her to be by the end of each episode. It was never a case of, ‘Here’s a cool idea for a car chase.’ It was always, ‘Here’s the emotional arc. What’s the right vehicle for that?’”
“I did ‘Banshee’ where it was the opposite,” Tropper added. “But this was a show where it’s all about her evolution as a character, and we spent the majority of our time on that. Then we would sit down and go, ‘Okay, now what are the mechanics of this sequence?’ The main thing for us was always making sure everything we did continued Lucky’s story.”
New episodes of “Lucky” premiere Wednesdays on Apple TV.
