Warning! This story contains spoilers for The Hunting Party Season 2, Episode 8, “Elliot Carr.”

How to Watch

Watch The Hunting Party Thursdays at 10/9c on NBC and next day on Peacock.  

The April 2 episode of The Hunting Party, NBC’s thrilling crime drama starring Melissa Roxburgh as CIA Agent Rebecca “Bex” Henderson, gave viewers a particularly chilling killer-of-the-week. For fans of the late series Manifest, it also provided a welcome reunion between Roxburgh and guest star Josh Dallas.

Dallas plays Episode 8’s eponymous Elliot Carr. A Pit escapee known as the “Connecticut Cobbler,” he’s infamous for turning nine former human victims into literal shoe leather — and he’s next on the list for Henderson, Agent Jacob Hassani (Patrick Sabongui) and Shane Florence (Josh McKenzie) to retrieve.

Carr is certainly a departure for Dallas, who’s played heroic characters in Once Upon a Time, or as the brother of Roxburgh’s character in the supernatural missing plane mystery Manifest. 

“He’s been Prince Charming. He’s been Ben Stone, or these wholesome warriors for other characters,” Roxburgh told NBC Insider about Dallas’ more familiar choices. “This is the first time he’s not that,” she continued.

“But because Josh played it so honestly, and because of who Elliot is, it still made me-slash-Bex just wanna hug him which is probably not great for a killer,” she joked.

In NBC Insider’s latest The Hunting Party interview, Roxburgh and Dallas sat down to talk with us about their first on-camera reunion since their Manifest days as the Stone siblings, and how frighteningly good Dallas was at playing a serial killer. Stream the episode, and every episode of Season 2, on Peacock.

RELATED: The Hunting Party Adds Josh Dallas, John Corbett & Additional Guest Stars to Season 2

Josh Dallas talks playing a bad guy on The Hunting Party 

Roxburgh and Dallas shared that the show’s filming schedule finally aligned with the actor’s, and he was thrilled to jump aboard.

“The prospect of coming back and working with Melissa was just like, ‘Yes, always yes!’ Having worked together for so long,  you show up to a set and it’s just sort of automatic,” Dallas told NBC Insider. “There’s so much work that’s already been done and you just get to play and really dig into the best of what our job is.”

Dallas embodied Carr, a former Pit guinea pig who’d endured 10 years of mental torture during captivity, with an aura of broken bravado. 

“I’ve never gotten to play that,” Dallas confessed. “I was so excited to be able to play somebody who was really messed up morally.

RELATED: Melissa Roxburgh Unpacks Bex’s Guilt Over Lying to Shane in The Hunting Party Episode 4

“This part was so warped,” he continued. “When [Carr] was a kid, going through abuses and then turning that around and wanting to dominate and control in a very specific way, was really interesting to me. But what was really got me was the fact that you talk about him inside The Pit and not only wasn’t [he] reformed, but he was reformatted.

“His psychology completely changed when he came out of that, and took his warped morality and warped it even more,” Dallas added. “And that’s what I found so delicious about how they wrote him, and couldn’t wait to come on board and play him.”

Asked what scene helped him figure out the character best, Dallas said it was when we first see him selling to a female customer at his elite boutique shoe store.

“He’s sort of in his glory, at his pinnacle,” Dallas observed. “He’s in his shop exerting all of his power, knowing that this woman came all the way from California. He knows immediately that he has control over her, because she came all this way. When I read that, it sets him up in such a beautiful way that I felt like, if I can get that part of him right, then as he warps even further as we come more into the present, it was gonna be just so much easier to go there if I got that part right. And hopefully, I did.”

Melissa Roxburgh and Josh Dallas say it felt like “a really strange episode of Manifest” on set

While Agent Henderson and Carr only share one climatic scene at the end of the episode, Roxburgh and Dallas did get to see one another on the set throughout the episode’s week of production in New York City.

“You know, the first couple of days felt like a really strange episode of Manifest between the two of us,” Dallas shared.

Roxburgh added that the two series shared some of the same crew members, which added to the déjà vu. “In some ways, it made it like a soft landing to come into because it was home again,” she explained. “But then in other ways, it was home with the walls painted red.”

Asked what is was like to watch Dallas play someone so twisted, Roxburgh said he was able to add his signature humanity and empathy to the character. “Josh found that honest bit of it where [Carr] was like, ‘It’s not wrong,” and it’s almost [like] a confusion of what [that] would mean. And so I think audience members are gonna be really excited by that, where they’re like, ‘Whoa, dude, no. You’re wrong. You’re real wrong,'” she laughed. 

Dallas then added about his co-star, “What’s so beautiful about Melissa in this part is she’s so grounded in the role. She’s so smart in the role. She’s this calm center of gravity where her character has a lot of empathy towards these people and she can really see who they are. Particularly with this character, she approaches him like a person and tries to get him to admit some sort of accountability about what he’s doing to get him to really understand what he’s doing. And of course, in his warped brain, he’s still trying to control the situation in the way he can.”

RELATED: The Hunting Party’s Melissa Roxburgh Shares the No. 1 Lesson She Learned from Manifest

In the end, Carr tries to take his own life rather than be put back in the pit. He survives the gunshot, which technically leaves the door open for a return appearance.

Speaking of hypotheticals, we had to ask if, after the Manifest finale, they thought the Stones would ever board an airplane again in their lifetimes?

Dallas cackled with laughter, and said, “Probably not. Yeah, I think not. I think it’s too tough.”

To which Roxburgh said, “I think we’re driving. Local trips only.”

New episodes of The Hunting Party air Thursdays at 10/9c on NBC and stream next-day on Peacock. Stream The Hunting Party Season 1 on Peacock now.