‘The Endgame’ Is A Twisty Heist Thriller With Two Very Determined Women On Opposite Sides Of The Law

It’s all about the accent, says Morena Baccarin.

She’s talking about her role in The Endgame, a new high‑stakes thriller series.

Baccarin plays Elena Federova, a very recently captured international arms dealer and criminal mastermind, who, even in captivity, orchestrates a number of coordinated bank heists. Her nemesis is Val Turner, a principled, relentless and socially outcast FBI agent, who will stop at nothing to foil Federova’s ambitious plan. 

Ryan Michelle Bathé stars as Val while Nick Wootton and Jake Coburn serve as executive producers of the series.   

The accent Baccarin mentions, was for her, “The biggest part that I’ve had to embrace about this character and work very hard on.”

She adds, “It’s not an accent I’ve done before, and it’s been a lot of fun to create this part. In the very beginning, we had several conversations ‑‑ Nick, Jake, and I ‑‑ about what [the character] should sound like, should we do an accent, should we not do an accent? Ultimately, we felt like it was very key to who this character was.”

There were many reasons Baccarin was attracted to the role, she says. “I always love the idea of playing somebody that is a little out there. This character is definitely not a caricature but larger than life, and she has the high, high stakes that really attracted me to it. There was a lot of humor. The story was really fun and a page‑turner when I went over the script.”

The ‘female factor’ of the narrative won Baccarin over as well. “I love the idea of a show about two women that is not about it being about two women, that is a show that is centered around these people that happen to be women and that are only opposite sides of ‘good and bad,’ but really ultimately are after the same thing.”

Digging deeper into her character, Baccarin explains, “I don’t see her as a villain. I think she is fighting for a good cause, and any good villain has real reasons to be doing what they are doing, and that is the case with this character. And I think, by the end of the pilot and certainly by the end of the second episode, if you are not rooting for her, I think ‑‑ or rooting for both of these women, then I think we’ve done something very wrong.”

With a bit of a ‘steal from the rich and give to the poor’ aspect to the story, Wootton says that the series is timely, for a number of reasons. “I think the thing that what we’re really exploring, more than the Robin Hood aspect, is the idea of corruption in plain sight. I think that we see some institutions as being kind of unbreakable. But then, when you look a little closer, there [are] flaws. We’ve seen a lot of that displayed to us pretty baldly over the last couple of years, and that is definitely forming our narrative.”

Wootton believes that the true hook of the series is that it doesn’t exactly unfold in an intuitive manner, as he says, “It starts off looking like one thing — that there’s a bad guy and a good guy — and what you see as the series goes on is this gray area and how there’s a gradual shift over this ten‑day period of time. So [it atarts] in one place, and ends in a very different one. That’s the arc of the show.”

‘The Endgame’ airs Mondays at 10pm on NBC and streams on Peacock.