1 of 3 | Season 2 of Idris Elba’s “Hijack” Season 2 premieres on Wednesday. Photo courtesy of Apple TV
The Wire, Luther and Avengers icon Idris Elba says Hijack Season 2 unpacks some of the questions left unanswered about his character Sam Nelson in the first season of the hostage thriller.
“Who, why, what, when? And, then, what happened to Sam after? What happened? Where did he go? What happened?” the 53-year-old British actor said during a recent virtual press conference.
“That became part of the development of what our character could possibly go through next. Well, we answered those questions, so we can say this about him,” he said.
“That was definitely some very, very early-on conversations about why are we coming back? And what do we want to see? And what would he have had to have gone through to get to where we see him in the first frame of the second season.”
Returning Wednesday with fresh episodes on Apple TV+, the thriller finds Elba’s highly skilled business negotiator trapped with dozens of terrified captive passengers on a speeding underground train in Berlin.
It takes place more than a year after Sam saved hundreds of passengers whose flight from Dubai to London was hijacked.
“There was a lot of discussion around, physically, what he might look like, how he might feel. This is a professional man, a professional negotiator. Has he worked [since the hijacking]? Probably not,” Elba said.
“He’s not gone back to work. His life is very different,” he added. “I was sort of really examining trauma, trauma response and what happens to men, especially, in these instances. There are some crazy residue effects that we didn’t explore all the way because that’s not necessary, but we would layer within Sam.”
Series co-creator and director Jim Field Smith said the creative team worked hard to come up with another tense, but relatively plausible predicament for Sam.
“We wanted to find a way to start again, almost and explore the character through an even more challenging lens,” Smith said.
“We didn’t want to just kind of retread what we’d done the first time around. So, we immediately started thinking: ‘What can we do to Sam? Where can we put Sam that will push him even further?’ And, part of it, for me, as a filmmaker, is just wanting to do something completely different and, also, push myself a little bit into a slightly less of a comfort zone.”
Although both modes of transportation place their passengers in confined spaces, people who fly must go through security, show identification, sit in their assigned seats.
They also aren’t usually wearing bulky winter clothing and carrying bags, limiting their options for hiding a weapon.
People traveling the rails, on the other hand, are an unknown quantity. All they need to do is buy a ticket and hop on.
“It was like: ‘A plane story, 5,000 feet In the air. What’s the opposite of that?’ It’s an underground train,” Smith said.
“And then that pushes Idris into an interesting space for the character because he’s in this kind of physical and moral maze underground, and he’s having to make pretty tough decisions at every turn.” he added. “Once we’d landed on that, it kind of flowed really, really well from there.”
Elba joked that he would have preferred being hijacked on a cruise ship in Barbados this time around.
“But they weren’t having that,” he said.
Smith said he understood why Elba initially was a bit reticent about getting crammed into a small space with a bunch of strangers again.
“There’s a natural instinct to kind of go, ‘Oh, we’ve just spent a couple of years making a show set on an airplane,’ and there’s a natural feeling of, ‘Oh, I can’t possibly go back anywhere close to that kind of territory,'” Smith said.
“But, at the end of the day, you can only hijack a method of transport. You can’t hijack a building,” he added. “Partly, the success of the show is that it is this kind of claustrophobic, microcosmic society. In Season 2, they’re trapped on another metal tube, but they’re hurtling underground around a city. That is what the show is about. It’s about locking Sam Nelson in a puzzle box with a lot of people and seeing how he works his way through a problem.”
The show’s ensemble includes Christine Adams, Max Beesley, Archie Panjabi, Christian Näthe, Clare-Hope Ashitey and Toby Jones.
Venice Film Festival: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson promote new film
Star Idris Elba (R) and his wife Sabrina Dhowre Elba attend the red carpet premiere of “A House of Dynamite” during the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in Italy on September 2, 2025. Photo by Rocco Spaziani/UPI | License Photo
