‘Jett’ On Cinemax Has The Best Role For a Female on TV — Carla Gugino and Sebastian Gutierrez Explain Why

“I didn’t realize how unusual she is as a character until I was in her skin,” Carla Gugino told me in the suite of a midtown New York City hotel on a dreary, rainy afternoon this week. And I also didn’t realize how unusual her latest character, that of Daisy “Jett” Kowalski, is until we spoke about it. Despite the fact that I’ve seen the first half of the nine, hour-long episode season of Jett on Cinemax, it wasn’t until Gugino and creator, writer, and director of Jett, Sebastian Gutierrez, who would join us momentarily, started speaking about the character, the process of making the show, and the specific world it portrays that it truly became apparent just how unique it is to have such a focused and fierce professional thief as the leading lady in crime noir series. But this is 2019 and luckily there’s room for this long overdue character on our screens now.

There are many layers to both Jett as a dynamic character and Jett as an intricate and interesting series. The first episode does its best to introduce you to this world, but it’s by the end of the second episode that the series cements many things: how fun and unpredictable and addictive it truly is.

If Jett, and Jett’s, appeal is not immediately apparent to you as well, just know it took Gugino some time to realize the importance, specifically of her character, as well. Jett’s a professional thief. She’s inherently sexy without having to be explicitly so. She’s done her time in prison. She’s out now, with (almost) every intention of sticking to her bartending shifts and duties as a mother to her young daughter. Until a…shall we say, opportunity, comes her way and she simply can’t say no. Of course, it’s no spoiler here to tell you that’s not the only opportunity that arises, or the series would be awfully short. But through it all, Jett is stoic, calculated, calm: a new experience for Gugino, responsible for conveying this on screen, as well as for viewers who have rarely witnessed this type of woman in other TV shows or movies before (though it is worth mentioning her previous role as a bounty hunter in Karen Sisco here). “Obviously I’m very familiar with the material, I’m a producer on it, I’ve known it for a very long time,” Gugino said. “But once I was in her skin I realized even how I felt the need to convey more emotion or to let the outside world know what I was feeling. She doesn’t do that.”

Of course we’ve seen this time after time from male characters, you know, the kind that are “allowed to be enigmatic and just exist,” as Gugino put it. But what you need to know about Jett is that, “She is incredible in a crisis. She’s extremely pragmatic.” When Gugino was tasked with finding inspiration for the character, she turned to Lee Marvin in Point Blank and Clint Eastwood’s earlier roles, simply because there weren’t many other female figures to reference. “Neither Sebastian nor I were interested in having her take on male qualities, but more, what if a woman really was like that. What if she just keeps her own counsel, she has her own moral compass and that’s the way that she looks at life.”

“We were hoping we could create a new role model for young women,” Gutierrez said. “A calm criminal who assesses. She’s the opposite of hysteria. Her whole life is about figuring out how to do things. Jett is not an expert marksman or a martial arts expert, she doesn’t have any superpower. She’s just a really observant, smart woman who happens to be a great thief. That’s what she’s always wanted to be.”

Gugino added, “Her dreams were not made of becoming a princess or getting married or having children, per se. She just grew up dreaming of stealing things. She has the precision of a master watchmaker or a neurosurgeon. There’s this very practical, specific nature to her. I don’t think she even thinks of herself as a criminal. This is just something she’s really good at. And now she’s in a new circumstance where she has a daughter and that’s changing everything for her.”

And as any professional thief knows, this also means changing your appearance at times, and let’s just say when it comes to the disguises in Jett, specifically the variety of wigs employed here, well, eat your heart out, The Americans. “I also love a good wig moment, and I’ve had many a wig in many pieces,” Gugino said. “Sometimes, in this case, you know Jett’s wearing a wig. Of course in The Haunting of Hill House, I wore a wig the entire time because I wanted her to have this very long voluminous hair.” She went on to say that as an actress the hair pieces do help her step into that character, into that moment, into the task at hand. “It absolutely changes everything. It’s interesting because the real Jett wears the simplest clothes, drives the simplest car, lives in a very simple house. Everything is very non-flashy. It’s actually about disappearing. That is her job. Unless she wants to be noticed, and then she knows exactly what to do.”

For Gugino, Jett wasn’t only a different kind of character for her to take on as an actress, but the opportunity to pick up many new skills. “I definitely got to pick a lot of locks, which I had never done. I’m not a closet klepto or anything, so some of that was really interesting, and realizing how good she would have to be to succeed.” But perhaps the biggest challenge for Gugino came from having to do…well, nothing. “The thing that I got to do that I have never gotten to do as an actor was just exist. There are all these people and characters swirling around her and this person is just putting one foot in front of the other. I think that was maybe why the shoot was not exhausting for me, even though I was working a huge percentage of the days. There was something about the way that Jett assesses and looks at the world that I found very comforting. I’m Italian, I speak with my hands, I’m very emotional. So it was a really interesting thing that I’ve never done before.”

“You got to dance in Cuba,” Gutierrez offered up as another activity she got to try for the first time. “I got to dance in Havana, that is a first,” Gugino remembered fondly. “I [had] never been to Cuba. It was really great.”

Gutierrez was also faced with many firsts on this project, namely the fact that he “had to make up four and a half movies” which is what the series adds up to. “And I had to edit them and finish them in the amount of time that you finish one movie. I was like, ‘Huh. This is kind of crazy.’ But it was super. It was really fulfilling and I don’t take it for granted at all. It was a lot of work, but we were up for the task and had a lot of fun doing it.”

“He wrote all of them, directed all of them, posted all of them. It really is all within a year,” Gugino added, clearly impressed with the process. “It’s funny, Frances McDormand said once to us, we crossed paths in Austin, Texas, both of us were shooting down there, and she said, ‘Women’s stories are much harder to tell in an hour and a half. We really need more time.’ In a way, we got the luxury of time to uncover a lot. But still, it felt like we were making a movie. That was exciting too.”

Perhaps that’s due to the fact that the real-life partners have made several movies together, including Judas Kiss, Women in Trouble, and Elektra Luxx, so Jett was not just a fun yet grueling professional project to work on together, but also a way for the pair to spend more time with each other. “From a purely practical standpoint, it was great working on this thing for such a long period of time,” Gutierrez said. “I love making movies, the downside is you don’t get to see people you love. But if you get to work with them it’s very convenient. It was actually really fun.”

Gugino was looking forward to the shoot and spending time with Gutierrez, because she’d been away working in Atlanta for eight months, and credits the success of their work collaborations to the fact that “we are both incredibly passionate about what we do.” That means on set, and at home. “Somebody asked, ‘Do you have rules, stop talking about this that and that?’ Actually no, we don’t. It probably would be really annoying if one person was showing up just to do a job, but we’re both obsessive in that way.”

Gutierrez got the same question, recalling, “Somebody asked me the same thing, ‘Isn’t it a problem you have to go home at night with the lead actress?’ I’m like, ‘I get to go home at night with the lead actress! I don’t understand your question!’ I think they meant because we have to talk about it. Yeah, what else are you gonna talk about? We’re trying to figure this thing out together.”

Viewers will be trying to figure out the season of Jett together,  doing their best to decipher where Jett’s loyalty may lie in any one moment. Who (or what) is she truly working with, for, or against at any point. There are twists and turns and surprises and shocks and loyalties change within a single episode. This is much of the thrill of watching this show from home, but when it comes to performing, it was easier for Gugino to know where her character would be ending up. “In this particular case, Sebastian wrote all of them, I had all of the material, so I did know. I prefer that. And I think that there is something interesting about TV that’s done chronologically where you don’t know where it’s gonna end up exactly because that is like life. We don’t know. But from an artistic standpoint, and especially with something this significant and plays with time this much, it was really important and really helpful to know where it goes.”

It was also important considering Jett is a TV series, “but it was made like a movie,” Gutierrez tells me of “the longest shoot that we’ve ever done.” The show wasn’t shot in chronological order but by the availability of cast members or locations, which left Gutierrez in the edit room with “one big puzzle,” to put together.

Gutierrez wrote the story Jett in between jobs for the last three years, writing a new chapter whenever he had a moment, “almost like a novel.” Ultimately, the inspiration came from, “Both a lifetime of reading crime novels that I love, and then looking around the TV landscape and thinking, ‘Huh. Female roles are much better in television than film.’ But antiheroes are still mostly men. Why can’t you have a woman in that role?” He drew from his own life growing up in Venezuela in a household of women and said, “I’ve always been really fascinated and interested in the sister-like bond that women make,” which is front and center in this series as Jett surrounds herself with loyal and dedicated female friends that add to her life. “An important secret story inside the story of Jett is this group of women that assemble around her as this family. It’s not that the male characters aren’t complex. But really it is about this sisterhood around [her]. Those things were exaggerations or projections of things that I have seen in my life in my household,” Gutierrez said. And this, ultimately is what makes Jett and Jett even more complex and interesting, that such a unique female character can exist, and is surrounded by fellow complex female characters, all inside a show about flashy crimes — and without ever overtly speaking this out loud.

“It would defeat my point if she were to talk about it,” Gutierrez said of Jett. “Then it would become corny because Jett is not really prone to the small talk. It’s not that she can’t do it, because we see in the first episode that she can play the part and do all the small talk you want.”

When it comes to telling the story of Jett, this show skips the visual small talk. Inspired by Quentin Tarantino, and Elmore Leonard before him, Gutierrez explains of his genre of choice, “The great thing as a narrative device in noir is the present is the only thing that matters, but the past keeps crashing into it, and the future is not what you thought it was going to be because of that decision you made that was gonna be the last job. So built into it there’s this great notion where you don’t have to do a lot of boring exposition stuff. You can just jump to the cool scenes.”

He continued, “To me, the most important thing is it is not depressing, it is not dark. It’s a really playful tone, but it is character-driven. The violence is not played for laughs. It has real consequences. All the shots are very specific, and they’re very composed and very color-coated, it’s sumptuous and luscious. But the emotions are real. My manager was like, ‘This is a very strange show. This violent scene and then this very heart-warming scene and then this sexy scene?’ But that’s the world.”

Jett premieres Friday, June 14 at 10pm on Cinemax. 

Where to stream Jett