Gabriel Basso Says It Was ‘Kind of Weird’ Playing ‘Cool Dude’ JD Vance. Then ‘The Night Agent’ Brought TV Stardom 

Gabriel Basso is about to launch the second season of one of the biggest shows on TV. But if you ask him, he’s about ready to give it all up.

“The actors that built this business all had life experiences,” Basso, 30, says over a double espresso during a recent visit to New York. “They all fought in the war. They were all doing stuff outside of this. And to me, how can you as an actor portray real events insulated from reality? You literally can’t do it.”

Basso is visiting town from his home in South Carolina to promote “The Night Agent.” In 2023, the conspiracy drama’s first season revolved around Basso’s character Peter Sutherland, a winsome, appealing FBI agent eager to do what is right. The show’s mix of popcorn and creator Shawn Ryan’s endless willingness to complicate its narrative made it one of Netflix’s most-viewed series ever; at the end of 2023, the streamer said viewers had watched Basso’s daring exploits for some 812 million hours.

All of which should feel like a major accomplishment for a young actor who’s been trying to make it since he broke out as Laura Linney’s surly teen son on the early-2010s dramedy “The Big C.” Basso, who recently had a pivotal supporting role in Clint Eastwood’s well-received “Juror No. 2” and has wrapped production on Kathryn Bigelow’s untitled next movie, is having the kind of run one of his peers might dream of. And with his upright bearing, his daredevil hobbies and his unusual ability to hold the camera’s gaze, he seems primed for a major career. His firm handshake and unbroken eye contact, as well as his unshakeable confidence in conversation, are those of a movie star.

And yet. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first thing he did after Season 1 finished filming was go to Tennessee and get a stonemason’s license,” says Ryan, Basso’s “Night Agent” boss. “Other actors would have been dialing their publicist. He likes to do the work more than talk about the work.” Ryan also tells me, “I’ll be curious how your interview goes with him, because I don’t think talking to the press is his favorite thing to do.”

Basso actually doesn’t mind doing press, he says. “I’ve not compromised morals or principles to be here, so I’m doing a good thing.” With that said, though, he hopes not to have to take part in the entertainment-industry circus for too much longer. “Right now, I’m doing acting to the best of my ability,” Basso says. “But at the same time, I don’t feel like a productive part of society. If I build a stone wall — that’s a thing. I’ve served the community. I think there’s more important things that a 30-year-old man can do with his life.”

For now, Basso is filming the third season. And he even took part in a real though at-times reluctant-seeming press tour while in New York. On “Good Morning America,” which he taped just before our meeting (at which Basso is still camera-ready in a crisp white tee and black jeans and boots), he told Lara Spencer that the show was a hit because of “an inherent distrust for government.” And on “The Tonight Show,” he responded to one of Jimmy Fallon’s absurdist flourishes with “And the government would never hurt you.” Both times, his square-jawed face broke into a game, unguarded smile.

Basso, leaning upright against a wall in our coffeeshop booth with his legs outstretched, tells me that he’s “not really a political person,” but quickly adds, “I think our form of government is illegitimate. It’s never supposed to have been a federal government. That’s not what we started as — but everything is federal now.”

We are speaking only days before Basso’s most famous-in-his-own-right character is to become one of the most powerful figures in that federal government. In 2020, Basso’s turn as JD Vance in the film “Hillbilly Elegy” — narrating Vance’s hardscrabble upbringing and his Horatio Alger journey through law school — hit Netflix; two years later, Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate, before all that followed.

Glenn Close, who was Oscar-nominated for playing Vance’s grandmother in “Hillbilly Elegy,” has criticized the politician. But Basso sidesteps the question of the new V.P.’s beliefs. “It’s kind of weird to be included in that timeline,” he says. “When he’s thinking about his life — they made a movie of his book, and my name will always be in the description.” The two men spoke before the film was shot. “We talked a little bit. He’s a cool dude. We’re both from the Midwest. We just talked about life — about growing up in the woods.”

Basso is, in his own telling, a fairly internal individual; his Missouri childhood was spent rambling about and indulging solitary pursuits. “I sort of floated around because I was athletic, but I liked to draw,” he says. Later, he got involved in acting as part of the family business of sorts. A bit later, Basso was featured in Variety’s 2010 Youth Impact Report, which noted his running lines with his sisters, already working in commercials and TV, before he booked a guest spot on Nickelodeon’s “iCarly” and found early movie roles. “I came out to L.A. to visit my mom and sisters when I was a kid,” he says. “Even throughout my whole child acting career, I didn’t want it. It was just fun, it was something to do — I would not have done well if I was only going to school.”

In Variety’s 2010 report, his mom was quoted as saying, “He’s able to go to a place in his imagination where he truly believes that what’s happening is real.”

Now, he spends time in adrenaline-fueled hobbies like motorcycling or skydiving. (On Christmas Day, Netflix broadcast a pre-recorded stunt in which Basso jumped from a blimp over Houston’s NRG Stadium as part of their first-ever football broadcasts.) “I wouldn’t say it’s a thrill-seeking thing,” he says. “It’s about finding the threshold of focus. If I’m skydiving, am I checking my outcome? If I’m rally driving, am I focused on three turns ahead?”

The ability to remain clearheaded in the midst of accelerating chaos is one Basso shares with his “Night Agent” character — Peter has a crispness of purpose no matter what new narrative turn comes his way. And it’s served him well on set. “He can be relaxed in rehearsals, but then when the camera turns on, he’s immediately in the moment,” Ryan says. “And he doesn’t have an ego about, ‘What’s the best way to present me?’”

Ryan — whose first effort as a creator and showrunner, “The Shield,” won Michael Chiklis an Emmy in 2002 — had wanted to cast an unknown in the lead role, and Netflix and Sony (which produces the series) agreed. “Film takes stars, and TV makes stars,” he says. Basso auditioned with a long beard (part of his character’s look in a film he was shooting), and Ryan passed on him — until a Sony executive suggested that Ryan take another look, once Basso had shaved.

“Sometimes the actors meld toward the characters, and sometimes the characters meld toward the actors,” Ryan says, comparing Basso to Peter, who’d been plucked from low-level bureaucracy to perform special ops. “He’s doing his job, maybe making a couple of mistakes here and there, making up for the mistakes — I’ve seen his confidence grow, and I’ve seen his ability grow.”

Similarly, Peter begins his journey on the series with an almost puppyish intensity; as the second season wears on, the moral compromises he has to make in order to perform his job take their toll. Describing a moment, midseason, where Peter has to tell a lie in order to further his mission, Ryan says: “There’s this moment where he shows you how sick to his stomach he is that he told that lie. That is really subtle, wonderful acting that if we asked him to do in Season 1, he could’ve” — here, Ryan’s voice sounds uncertain — “but we knew in Season 2 he could do it.”

Maybe this is one more way that actor and character are alike: Faking it is anathema to Basso. In response to my somewhat milquetoast comment about how the show’s dealings of misinformation feel “relevant nowadays,” Basso unleashes an un-sound-bite-able torrent about how the show’s mixture of emotion and cold, hard truth challenge an audience accustomed to being coddled: “In today’s day and age,” he says, “you put a lot of value on how you feel. Someone who’s good at making you feel things — that’s propaganda. That’s what governments do. They mobilize emotion and use it against you, to get people to value emotion over reason.” (“The Night Agent,” by contrast to the phenomenon Basso senses, has both high personal stakes and a steely rational core.)

The actor’s disdain for feeling over authenticity extends to his work onscreen, too — particularly fight scenes. “He has a lot of friends that work in the professional fighting game, military, combat sports,” says Ryan. “He feels an obligation to get things right so that the people he knows don’t give him shit for being Hollywood bogus.”

“I bet you’ve met a lot of actors who are in great shape,” Basso says. “Can they fight? I don’t know! They don’t know. They know they’ve got a six-pack, they know they’re in shape, they know that they can hit pads while accommodating mitt-holders are psyching them up.” These actors, Basso says, rely on editing to stitch it all together while, as Ryan told me, “The Night Agent” cuts as little as possible. “In their head, there’s a cognitive discrepancy,” Basso goes on. “Can I actually do this thing, or is it important that society believes that I can do this thing?”

Basso presents a conundrum. He is personable, direct, and engaged — the first thing he asks me is to explain the ethical rules governing speaking off the record, not because he plans to, but just because he’s always been curious. Over the course of our conversation, he quotes J.R.R. Tolkien, Leo Tolstoy, ancient Roman history, and “Kung Fu Panda.” And yet the first time I’m meeting him — within the context of a project that is likely to elevate him to a new level of fame when the second season drops — he claims he’s walking away from the business. Is he actually going to do the thing, or is it important that society believes he’s going to do the thing?

Ryan has contemplated the possibility. “How long does Gabriel want to do the show?” the showrunner asks rhetorically. “The show is called ‘The Night Agent.’ It’s not called ‘The Gabriel Basso Show.’ So there may be a time when he decides he wants to do something else, and there’s a different night agent.”

And Basso says he’s serious. When? In five or 10 years? “It’ll be sooner than that,” he says. “The monopoly of youth is energy, and I think that I have to convert that into service in order to be legitimate as a person.” His recent experiences have, in his telling, all been positive — he was dazzled by Eastwood, and Bigelow was an effective captain of what he describes as “a Greek trireme — everyone has their oar, and everyone’s doing their job.” Her no-nonsense approach and the “crazy levels of expectation” suited Basso well, he says. Perhaps work is most rewarding when it really feels like work.

There’s something fundamentally paleo about Basso, from his out-of-another-era firm handshake to his not carrying a cellphone. (His publicist and I text one another to triangulate his location as he arrives.) “I’m a medieval peasant,” he says. “I reject what I see in society. If a guy was to come into my village and peddle these black mirrors that everyone stares into all day, I’m trying to get this guy out of my village.” Which is not to say he never uses technology: Recently, he saw on Instagram a picture taken from the top of Mt. Everest, and felt a sense of disgust. “I’m on my couch, dog,” he recalls thinking. “Why am I getting that view?”

Which makes it ironic that — for now, at least — the view from the top that he’s earned came from his work on Netflix, the most efficient serotonin delivery device the entertainment and tech industries have yet devised. “I’m consistent in the way that I recognize storytelling is important,” he says. “I know that I’m in the machine. But there’s a responsibility within the machine to make your thing good. To not say, tee-hee-hee, I stole your money, I’m gone.”

When he is gone, Basso says, he hopes to launch a non-profit to better train police officers, including time on shooting ranges and “most importantly, mental performance.”

“Police officers are representatives of a government people don’t trust,” he says. “And in order to make that government real socially, people need to see something tangible.”

It would take him away from Hollywood, and, perhaps, deeper into a society-wide vibe shift away from the values that have dominated discourse for the past five years. When I remark that many people, in recent years, have not thought the problem with policing is that it’s too well-funded — in fact, quite the opposite — he declares, with surgical confidence, “I would err on the side of, I’d rather a police officer be well-trained, composed, and if they do mess up, we hold them accountable.”

Peter, on “The Night Agent,” makes his way through situations through purity of spirit and through confidence. He is doing the right thing, as best he knows how — and he knows his own mind, as well. Speaking to Basso feels a bit like being a cast member on that show: His certitude buoys the conversation even as twists and abstractions come into play. In our conversation about policing, Basso notes, unprompted, that “it’s wrong that a company can morally educate people after dropping $300 million on a movie. Scrap the movie! Give it to the society that built your studio because COVID shut down all the mom-and-pop shops.”

Extended to its logical conclusion, this might be taken to mean that “The Night Agent” ought to be shut down, too. And Basso might be sanguine about that outcome, given his general outlook on the industry he’s been working in since youth.

“If all actors were to die tomorrow,” he says, “society would continue. This business is not important in the scheme of society.” I expect him to pause, but he barrels on. “Storytelling is important, but some kid has a grandfather reading. They don’t need me to tell stories.”

As for the long-term fate of Peter on “The Night Agent” — the biggest job Basso has yet had, and one its own creator thinks he might yet leave before it wraps up — Basso is at peace. “I’m probably going to take a break,” he says. “I think Peter’s making decisions that have to happen. And it would be doing the audience a disservice if every season, he was fine.” His voice takes a rare sarcastic tinge, an angle that’s refreshing and unexpected from a fairly earnest thinker. “‘This season, I’m saving two presidents!’ At some point, the audience would be like, I get it now. No one wants to see someone who’s untouchable. When you’re watching the Captain America movie, you know Captain America’s not going to die.”

We wrap up, and Basso heads out into the New York winter; he had said, earlier in the interview, that he didn’t mind the city, as cities go, because “you can feel surrounded by people and yet completely alone.” I stay back to pay the check, and a table of three behind us gestured me over. They wanted to know who I’d been speaking to, because they knew they were huge fans of his, but they didn’t know what they knew him from.