How Netflix’s ‘Man on Fire’ Creates Its Own John Creasy

[This story contains spoilers from the first two episodes of Man on Fire season one.]

The past few years have seen the rise of a new generation of high-quality shows about heroes in the mold of Jack Ryan or Jack Reacher: military veterans who use their battle-tested skills to protect the innocent and make sure the bad guys pay. At first blush, the new Netflix series Man on Fire seems like one of these shows.

Executive producer Steven Caple Jr., who directed the first two episodes of the series starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (which dropped all eight episodes on Thursday), explains what’s so appealing about the genre. “It’s wish fulfillment,” he says. “People love to see themselves in the shoes of a Jack Reacher or a Jack Ryan in terms of an espionage thriller.”

But there’s a difference between Man on Fire’s John Creasy and his peers like Reacher or Ryan, and that difference goes to the heart of what Caple and Abdul-Mateen wanted to accomplish with the show in the first place. Creasy, as adapted from A.J. Quinnell’s book series and previously played by Denzel Washington in a 2004 movie of the same name, is working through a messy reality that’s far from the traditional hero’s journey.

“We were purposefully trying to create our own lane with the John Creasy character, who is very much layered, very nuanced in the way he’s dealing with some trauma,” Caple says.

The trauma he’s referring to is severe PTSD, whose origins are explored in the pilot: A Special Forces mission Creasy is running in Mexico City unexpectedly goes south, resulting in the violent deaths of several of his friends and colleagues. Creasy is the only one to make it out alive, and the disaster — and the psychological scars it leaves on him — derail his military career.

Only four years later, in the wake of a desperate suicide attempt, does he have an opportunity to try and get his life back on track, when an old friend (Paul Rayburn, played by Bobby Cannavale) offers him a private security job in Rio de Janeiro. Then, when terrorists blow up the entire high rise where the Rayburn family lives, Creasy is the only one left to protect his friend’s surviving daughter (Billie Boullet) — that is, if he can overcome the PTSD that is so closely tied to violent tragedy.

“There are a lot of things to explore with the character, and trying to connect that to the journey itself — which makes the overall IP interesting to me, which is the reason I’m even here — because of the layer of depth added to the character,” Caple says. “It’s wish fulfillment, finding yourself in an exotic place, by yourself, with no one else to help. What would you do? How would you step up to the plate, especially when you have to save someone you care about?”

Abdul-Mateen says that his character’s emotional and psychological struggles were a big part of what interested him in the role. “Actors love that stuff. You know what I mean? I want to feel, I want to feel,” he says. “Honestly, I really love the complexity of Creasy.”

He adds, “Steven and I had a conversation very early on in the process where we said, ‘If we’re going to do this, then we want to do it a certain way.’ One of the things was to try to stay as close to the truth as possible. I had a ball trying to figure out, ‘What would be true in this scenario?’ It’s very tempting when you have a character as potentially cool as Creasy, to do what is ‘cool.’ It took a lot of faith on the director’s part to allow me to not think about what’s cool but try to investigate what is true, and then from there we can say, ‘Now what if we did it with this type of attitude?’ But we were always working from a place of truth, which was a very exciting opportunity because it also felt a little bit dangerous. As an actor, I’m attracted to the dangerous opportunities, because they make my brain tick.”

The goal was to find out what would happen when Creasy, who used to excel in harrowing situations, is confronted with the exact conditions that are likely to trigger his most haunting memories. They worried it might not work, but decided to double down on the danger, Abdul-Mateen adds.

“That’s why the first couple episodes specifically feel cinematic,” he says. “We went into it head-first and said, ‘We’re going to make it honest and cinematic. We’re going to lean into the scale because we believe in what this is.’ When we do it that way, it’s no longer dangerous. Now we know there is so much more possibility in terms of the type of story we can tell and type of art we can create with these seven episodes of this epic story of this character called John Creasy.”

The inciting explosion at the end of the pilot was certainly cinematic, as was Creasy’s attempt to pilot an airplane while under fire in the second episode, of which Caple says, “Delroy Lindo definitely did his part in making sure he was able to pull off some of his stunts.”

He notes, “As we go along this journey with Creasy, he’s going to have to make decisions that either go into the lane of him redeeming himself or go down a darker path. So it was like: how big should we go with this thing? How should it feel? And then to layer behind, who’s behind this? What conspiracy is behind this?”

THR won’t spoil the ending here, but we had one more question for Abdul-Mateen: Was it daunting to take on a role last played by Denzel Washington?

“No, no, was that daunting? I never looked at it that way,” he says. “I’m a big fan — I’m a huge fan of Man on Fire, what am I saying? I don’t want to underplay how much of a fan I am of that work. So it was an opportunity for me to really slow down and ask myself, ‘Why do this?’ and to be honest about that and find a reason, or don’t [do it]. If I did not find a reason to do it, then so be it, but I found a reason, and it had a lot to do with getting a chance to work with Steven. It had a lot to do with getting a chance with creating a piece of work that was separate from the last thing I had done with Wonder Man. This one, I felt that there was international scale to it, I got to speak some Spanish, there were so many great opportunities. That’s what I saw. Those were the green lights that inspired to me to proceed.”

All of Man on Fire season one is now available to stream on Netflix.