What To Know
- Jill Wagner reflects on how she helped to create Lionesswith Taylor Sheridan.
- The actress-turned-producer also reveals how her character Bobby brings pieces of her real life into the story, too.
Since most of the action in Lioness Season 3 has taken place on the homeland, instead of in a foreign war zone, fans have had time to see much more of the longtime characters in their elements, including Bobby (Jill Wagner), the leader of the QRF team and right hand of Joe McNamara (Zoe Saldaña) who’s emerged as a voice of conscience for the crew in the latest episodes.
Ahead of Season 3, Wagner, who was a big part of the creation of the series, had decided to spend more time behind the scenes than on screen, which meant Bobby was more of a supporting presence than a centerpiece. The reason? Since she’d been partially responsible for the creation of the series as a whole, and was thus an executive producer on it, Taylor Sheridan gave her a choice.
“I remember Taylor asked me, he said, ‘OK, so you’re a producer on this. So what do you want to do? Do you want to produce, or do you want to act?’” Wagner told TV Insider. “Of course, I’d spent the latter part of my life acting, but I felt a real desire to get behind the camera and understand — not to be in control, but to just be able to watch him and his team and learn from them. I know when there’s really learnable moments that I need to step into, and so I told him, I said, ‘I would rather produce more. I would rather learn this world.’ I mean, I’ve produced smaller things, but this is like the biggest thing on TV. I mean, this is basically a big-budget film.”
Ryan Green / Paramount+
Still, she did want to have some room to play. “I said, ‘Look, boss, just let me play with the boys,’” Wagner remembered. “‘Just let me go out and kill some bad guys, and let me have fun.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to write you a character that’s a lot of fun.’”
When she was initially presented with the role of Bobby, Wagner said she was quite intimidated — until a key styling change brought it all together for her. “When he handed me Bobby, I was scared to death. I was like, ‘I don’t know how to play her.’ And I didn’t know how to play her until I cut my hair.” That textured mullet, it seems, was a game-changer in more ways than one.
Plus, Wagner’s use of the word “boss” in that initial request would unexpectedly become a signature phrase for Bobby, and that was absolutely intentional on Sheridan’s part.
“[The phrase] does come from me. I have called Taylor, ‘Boss,’ I guess, ever since he became my boss,” Wagner admitted. “What’s funny about Taylor is he — it’s so weird, you don’t think he’s doing it, but you’ll just have a conversation with him, and you’ll think it’s a bunch of meaningless stuff, or you’re having a whiskey with him, and you’re thinking, ‘Oh, nobody’s going to remember any of this.’ That’s not true. Parts of Bobby’s story are true. There might have been one bar fight that I told Taylor about, and I was reading the script. I’m like, ‘Oh my god, no!’ He’s like, ‘Don’t tell me anything.’ But he’s also good in that way that he understands, as a person, bringing in parts of the actor naturally into the character, which I think is pretty cool, and not a lot of writers do that.”
There’s another facet of Bobby that stems directly from Wagner’s life: her constant use of toothpicks. “The toothpick is my dad,” Wagner said. “My dad always had a toothpick in his mouth for most of my life. In fact, to the point where I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, Dad, do you sleep with that thing?!’ So the toothpick is a little homage to my father. It’s not just a way to make Bobby look cool; it has meaning.”
Her ability to imbue the character with such personalized styling is a reflection of Wagner’s outsized role in the creation of the series — and the deep bond she formed with Sheridan long before the series came along.
“Basically, he was my acting coach in my 20s, and he was writing a little movie called Sicario. I remember when we were studying together, and I knew there’s just something different about Taylor. You just kind of know, you’re like, ‘OK, you’re going somewhere,’” Wagner recalled. As she faced a bit of a screen career slowdown, Wagner said, “I was having a pity party, and I was like, ‘Well, I guess Hollywood [won’t work for me]. I never quite got to do what I wanted to do.’” After she informed her husband, an army man himself, that she wanted to play a member of the military on-screen, he suggested she come up with her own role. “I thought, ‘There’s no way I can create anything. I have no real knowledge. I know people in the military, but I don’t have inside information. And my husband was like, ‘Well, I’m here.’ He was in military intelligence for most of his career.”
After learning of the Lioness program from him, Wagner said, “It ignited this desire to see the real version of what I thought women were in the military.” She then presented Taylor with the idea, and he ran with it, and the rest is TV history.
Lioness, Season 3, Sundays, Paramount+