How ‘Ozark’ Became The Show That Always Left Us Guessing

After four masterful, edge-of-your-seat suspense-filled seasons, Ozark has every right to be compared to the top thrilling crime dramas that came before it like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. In one essential area, Ozark even takes the cake.

We always had a good idea of who was going to get whacked in The Sopranos. We knew Gus Fring’s well-mannered savagery would be no match for Walter White in Breaking Bad. The difference with Ozark, was every time we thought we knew what would transpire next, we were wrong.

(Season four part one and two **SPOILER ALERT**) For some more recent examples, who would have thought Darlene (and Wyatt) would be gone so abruptly ahead of the final episodes, or that Wendy Byrde, the puppet master, would check herself into a mental institution? Not to mention, who remained after the conclusion of the series finale…

(*NO MORE SPOILERS*)

One star of the hit series credits the collaboration with actors that the show’s writers and head honchos encouraged, in addition to the writers’ vision and creativity, as one of the major reasons we never knew what was going to happen next with the Byrdes and those who crossed paths with them.

“It all starts with the writing, right? It goes without saying that it’s always when you’ve got a good script, you launch from that script in a way that you can’t launch from it if you don’t have anything to launch from,” Ozark actor Felix Solis, who played the main antagonist Omar Navarro on the series, said. “And so it starts with the storyline and the writing.

“And then I also think what helped and aided it and what made greatness even greater was the fact that they asked my opinion. They asked, ‘What do you think?’ And as an actor, that’s a rarity in your career. You’re given the job. You do the job, and you move on. And that’s all right. There’s nothing wrong with that.

“But from time to time, there’s these magical moments when they turn to you and they say, ‘What do you think, Felix?’ and they’re actually interested in what your opinion is of the character and what you think is happening and so on and so forth.

“When that collaboration begins and a conversation like that is had, then you get a chance to add to that greatness. And one of the things that I think was important was to say — yeah, I was talking to Chris Mundy early on when we were shooting, the guy who created and wrote it, one of them, and I said to him, ‘The greatest feat the Devil ever pulled was making everyone believe he never existed, right? So how can we make this guy human? How can we bring him down to a humanistic level to the point where you don’t expect any of the things?’

“What we’re expecting doesn’t happen. And I also think that when you’re just in a collaborative energy, when there’s a collaborative energy you’re always able to say, ‘Well, what if we try it this way? What if we did it this way instead?’ And when you get a response like, ‘Yes, let’s try it,’ or, ‘Yes, I’m listening. Yes, I’m here for you to bounce some ideas,’ whether they use them or not is, I think at the end of the day irrelevant.

“What’s relevant is that you’re being asked what you think, and you’re being included in the conversation, you create in the conversation, and that definitely leads to these ideas where you get some of the [surprising] things. Just like, ‘Oh, s***. I didn’t think that was going to happen, and that was something that I didn’t expect.’

“And I also come from a place that the — this great saying, if you’ve seen into your future, it’s because you have been able to stand on the shoulder of giants. And the giants that I’ve stood on in my career growing up were people who always said, ‘Well, what’s the obvious choice in this scene? … Find the obvious, and then do the opposite.’

“And that was part of it. That was part of what you’ve seen. I think that’s part of — across the board, the characters are written in a way where you’re like, ‘That’s not the obvious choice.’ And that’s a credit to the creators and the writers.”