‘The Terminal List’ Star Breaks Down the Season 2 Finale’s Intense Action and What’s Next for Raife

Published Oct 27, 2026, 5:00 AM EDT

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Editor's note: The following contains major spoilers for The Terminal List Season 2.

Summary

• Season 2 of Prime Video's 'The Terminal List' ties the prequel story of 'Dark Wolf' into Jack Carr's novel True Believer, deepening Raife Hastings and James Reece’s blood‑brother bond.
• The series prioritizes 90% authenticity, gritty realism and relentless, large‑scale action set pieces with 10% Hollywood sprinkle.
• Raife is a moral, rogue truth‑seeker who’ll risk everything for his brothers and for the truth.

In Season 2 of the Prime Video series The Terminal List, based on former Navy SEAL-turned-author Jack Carr's second novel True Believer, former Navy SEAL operative Raife Hastings (Tom Hopper) discovers weapons shipments that have ended up in the hands of terrorists and teams up with investigative journalist Katie Buranek (Constance Wu) to get answers. As trust between them grows and they face threats together, they realize that their mission intersects with what Navy SEAL Commander James Reece (Chris Pratt) is dealing with. Eventually, Raife meets up with Reece so that they can stop a conspiracy with roots running back to Reece’s own Navy SEAL father.

Collider recently got the opportunity to chat with Hopper about the second season of the hugely popular book series and bringing the backstory from The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, which is set seven years before the events of the first season, into Season 2’s story. During the interview, he discussed the importance of authenticity, how Dark Wolf helped inform Raife Hastings, the dynamic with James Reece, the incredibly complicated finale action, getting to work with his wife Laura Hopper, his desire to tackle Carr’s book Savage Son, and a willingness to continue playing Raife for as long as the series and franchise continue. He also talked about his love for doing true escapism roles, how special his experience on Black Sails was, playing twins in Better, and what he’s doing next.

COLLIDER: Because of how real this show feels, it always raises my anxiety level while watching it.

TOM HOPPER: The authenticity side of it is something that we pride ourselves on, but it is also something that we are so strict on with ourselves. The group of guys that work on this show, and that includes all the actors, the producers, the writers, all of our military advisers, and all the SEALs that are part of it, all have the same mindset of making sure that it is 90% authenticity and 10% Hollywood sprinkle. That’s a huge part of The Terminal List and why I love being a part of it because we get to do it for real.

It seems fun, but it also seems incredibly exhausting.

HOPPER: Yeah, it’s a lot. I come away from the end of a season with the biggest buzz because you’ve been around all these guys for the last six months doing crazy stuff. For me, as a young guy always wanting to be in action movies, getting to do the kind of stuff we did this season, like flying around in a Black Hawk helicopter and shooting machine guns out of it, me and Chris Pratt were pinching ourselves. We were like, “This is just insane, what we’re doing here.”

Raife Hastings Was First Introduced in ‘The Terminal List: Dark Wolf’ To Provide His Background for Season 2

"There’s a lot of cross-pollination that goes on between the seasons of Dark Wolf and The Terminal List, and I like the way they do that."

Image via Prime Video

After the first season of The Terminal List, we went back in time with Dark Wolf, and now we’ve moved forward to the present again with Season 2. How did spending time on the prequel series help inform who Raife Hastings is in this series, as well as his 0relationship with Reece?

HOPPER: Dark Wolf was invented to introduce all these characters that then appear in True Believer (Season 2). So, it’s a really great thing for an audience to be able to start True Believer having been introduced to these characters. And with Raife, in particular, we see who he was as a SEAL. In the books, we only ever know Raife as an ex-SEAL, and I think it’s really important to know who him and Reece were when they were together in the SEALs, what his relationship was to Ben, and what that dynamic is between them all. For me, Dark Wolf was such a brilliant experience. Getting to work as closely as I did with Taylor Kitsch, we got a great bond on that, but it also allowed me and Chris to really get to know each other and what that blood brother relationship is from the books, between Raife and Reece. It was great.

I thought that they did such a great job with Dark Wolf and introducing characters like Mo and Landry, knowing where they get to in True Believer. As a fan of the books, I was so excited when I saw them in Dark Wolf because I was like, “Oh, man, we know where these guys go.” There’s a lot of cross-pollination that goes on between the seasons of Dark Wolf and The Terminal List, and I like the way they do that. I think there’s a plan to do that even more so in the future of the show. There’s a lot of potential there.

When you’re playing a soldier, you’re exploring levels of loyalty and brotherhood, but the thing that becomes more fluid are the moral complexities of warfare because different people have different moral lines and are willing to push those moral lines for different reasons. How does that shape Raife at this point in this season, and how does that shape his view of Reece?

HOPPER: Me and (showrunner) Dave DiGilio have always talked about the Dark Wolf/Light Wolf dial that you can turn as an operator – the morality wheel, so to speak. SEALs, and operators in general, are able to sit in Light Wolf, being around people and not thinking at all about killing them. They can operate completely normally. But when the time comes, they’re able to turn that dial. The thing that will then affect the ability to turn that dial on and off is personal connection to the thing that you have to do. That’s the thing that Reece goes through in The Terminal List in Season 1, with his family being killed. That dial is just fully turned. He doesn’t care anymore.

Raife understands that because he’s an operator. He understands the times that dial and the ability to control that dial is tested, but he has a very strong moral compass. In this season, Raife is missing the opportunities to turn that dial. He’s in a world where he’s in a setting where he’s just not comfortable. He’s not used to being in a work setting like that. Underneath the skin, he’s looking for that opportunity to turn that dial again. That’s something that I’ve talked to a lot of SEALs about. When you are no longer an operator, you miss it. You miss the excitement, you miss the fight, you miss going out there and fighting for a purpose. That’s the little bit of the operator in Raife that I wanted to tap into this season.

Raife doesn’t really even understand that he’s on a mission for a while. And then, it’s sanctioned, but not really. They’re in this weird grey area, which must also affect how you behave and how you react in certain situations.

HOPPER: That’s what we saw of Raife in Dark Wolf when he was like, “This is outside the rules now for me.” This season, he goes a little bit rogue, but Raife is an out and out truth seeker. Raife is someone who wants the truth and he wants to do good for what he believes to be good. Especially when he thinks that it might be putting Reece in danger, or the people that he knows and loves in danger, or his brothers in danger, he’ll do anything to fight for that. He has something against the system because he thinks the system is broken and he thinks the system is potentially corrupt, so he’s looking for those holes. He will go be a rogue cowboy to find out the truth.

From ‘The Terminal List’ to ‘Black Sails’ to ‘The Umbrella Academy,’ Tom Hopper Loves Doing True Escapism Roles

"One of the things I get the biggest kick out of is getting to experience something through a character and through a fictional world."

Image via Starz

From Black Sails to The Umbrella Academy to The Terminal List, you’re really no stranger to complex and physically demanding worlds to work within. Is that something that you seek out? Are you drawn to projects where a whole world is created for the characters you play to fit into?

HOPPER: I love doing true escapism roles. For me, as an actor, one of the things I get the biggest kick out of is getting to experience something through a character and through a fictional world. As I read scripts, I go, “What would that be like? It would be so cool to experience that.” It’s the reason why I started acting. I grew up on movies like Back to the Future. When Marty McFly goes into past and enters 1955, I experienced that through his eyes. I went into that past, and I went into the 2015 future with it. That’s the reason why I want to make movies and great TV. I want to give people that same experience. As I approach these roles, I want them to feel like they’re with me and they’re on that adventure and journey with me. That’s why I wanted to do it. If I get the chance to inspire young kids now sitting at home – they’re probably not watching The Terminal List, but if they’re watching other stuff I do – and experiencing those adventures through my eyes, then I’ve done my job.

I was such a fan of Black Sails. That cast was amazing, the character journeys were great to go on, and it created such a detailed world.

HOPPER: Yeah. That show was a super special few years for me. It was my first leading role in an ensemble and I got to learn a lot on that job. I learned so much from the actors around me, particularly Toby Stephens. I became very close with him and learned so much about his craft. It was just such a phenomenal cast of people and the writing on that was phenomenal. We were very lucky.

As sad as I was when that series ended, at least you were able to provide closure.

HOPPER: Yeah, we did all right with closing it off. Compared to some shows that just disappear, we did fairly well at closing it up.

The Terminal List is intense, serious, and full-on. There’s not a lot of time for jokes in it. What was your overall experience this season? What were the biggest challenges in everything that you had to do for this season?

HOPPER: It’s very complex this season. Raife has a lot of dialogue which is expositional, and as an actor, that’s always the toughest kind of dialog, to make sure you’re trying to inform the audience about what’s happening at the same time you’re creating dramatic depth and emotion. The biggest challenge is making sure that you’re creating a clear path for an audience in your storytelling because it’s a very complex one. But that’s also not totally my job. It’s the producer’s job to do that. As an actor, it’s important that you are all over the story. This is Dark Wolf 2.0, in terms of the size and the complexities of the story. With it being such a massive ensemble this season, keeping track of everything and what that means and who means what to who was a challenging thing from a studying the text standpoint. Through the season, you have a lot of questions, and they don’t really get answered until the end. You’re constantly going, “Well, hang on, who’s he now? Why is he there? What’s the link to that?” You constantly have this list of questions building up, just hoping that they get answered, and I think most of them do this season. There’s not much that’s not tied up by the end of the season.

I mentioned that there’s not a lot of time for jokes in this show, but there was one amusing moment involving your character when Tal calls him half-Viking, half-mental patient, which was a pretty accurate description after everything that happened to him before that moment. Did you see that as a fitting description for where he is at that point in the story? What was your reaction to that line?

HOPPER: It’s bang on, isn’t it? It’s right on the money. It’s where he is mentally with what he’s doing. They wanted to do a very different look for Raife this year, to what we saw in Dark Wolf. We really wanted to see that time had passed with him. He’s also still carrying all this stuff with Ben. Whether he found out about Ben dying or not is another thing, as well. There’s the guilt that he carries for not going to help Reece out when he knew that Reece was dealing with all this shit. He’s carrying a lot of weight. So, half-Viking, half-mental patient hits the nail on the head. It’s great. It’s a great reintroduction of Tal in that moment because she’s a real burst of energy in this season when she comes in and has that really great scene. I really love that scene with me and her on the balcony when we start to see eye to eye about the guilt you carry as an operator. Having that kind of open conversation, which can become emotional, happens rarely with these guys, so when they do, they’re real and there’s a connection there. I really enjoyed doing that scene with Shiraz [Tzarfati].

Before Raife has a better sense of what’s going on, he finds himself on the same path as Katie. What was it like to find that dynamic and play with that a bit, especially since it is very different from but ultimately converges with Reece’s mission?

HOPPER: That’s been created. That was never in the books. It was a great way to bring Raife into the fold for True Believer and create this fictional pattern of them having some kind of connection in the past, when Katie was trying to get a story from him for what she’s writing about Reece. I like that they’re a little bit at odds to begin with, but then also, Katie and Raife are more similar than they realize. They’re both truth seekers, they’re both looking for what is fair and right and justified, and they both learn a lot from each other. Raife realizes that he has to come a little bit more into Katie’s world with this whole press thing because she’s a journalist and has to engage a little bit with that, and then she realizes she needs to be a little bit more gung-ho and now can raise a weapon. They both learn a lot from each other. That’s the key takeaway.

Raife Hastings and James Reece Are Blood Brothers in ‘The Terminal List’ Universe

"There’s this weird telepathic connection between the two of them because they’re so interlinked."

Image via Prime Video

You can’t leave this many breadcrumbs in front of men like James Reece and Raife Hastings without them wanting to figure out what’s going on. What was it like to find the dynamic between the two of them this time around? Does Raife see Reece as a leader or is he more of a partner?

HOPPER: Definitely as a partner. In terms of what they were in the SEALs, they were lieutenants. They’re both equal, in terms of that hierarchy, from a military standpoint. In this situation, I think Raife sees it as Reece’s mission and he’s there to support it. Because Raife has been pulled into this entire thing, by the time those two get together, he’s like, “There’s no way I’m walking away and let you deal with this on your own. This is my mission as well now.” I think he’s happy for Reece to take the lead on it, but he’s absolutely there to support, in whichever way Reece needs it.

We’ve not properly gotten into that relationship yet in the show, but from the books, they’re blood brothers. They’ve spent so many years together and they know how they each fight and how they each work in a battle environment and how they each think. There’s this weird connection that they have where, even when they’re far apart, before they have that first phone call, there’s this thing drawing them together from afar. It takes a while for them to even learn that they’re on the same path, but there’s this weird telepathic connection between the two of them because they’re so interlinked.

Reece has such a wall up that he says to Raife, “You don’t have to be a part of this, this is not your fight,” and your Raife is like, “Yeah, we’re already on the same mission here.”

HOPPER: Yeah, it’s his fight too. That’s what’s different about Raife. When Freddy dies, it’s another loss. It might be a bit of a thing with Reece that’s like, “This is my fight and I don’t want you dying because of it,” whereas Raife doesn’t care about dying. What I love about Raife as a SEAL is that he’s fundamentally got that thing of, “It’s not about me, it’s about the man beside me. If I go into a room, I’m looking for who’s trying to shoot him, not who’s trying to shoot me.” That’s Raife all over. He will happily jump in front of a bullet for Reece. He was supposed to get out at the end, and he’s the only one still in there staying with Reece because he won’t leave him. There’s no chance he’s leaving him. Those two are very similar, but they also approach it in quite different ways. They’ll do anything for each other.

When the team is going after Vasili Adrenov, you’re going from a jet to a helicopter to a shoot-out on foot in a long, complicated, ongoing action sequence. What was that like to shoot?

HOPPER: All of that stuff was bonkers. That was towards the end of the shoot, so our schedule was getting tighter and tighter. We were working so fast through all of that stuff. It felt very much like a crazy war zone because we would do one beat and then we would do the next, but we were doing long cuts of sequences to get more pieces to stitch together. We did a lot of that section by section. We did all the Black Hawk stuff, coming in on the Black Hawk, shooting guys from the Black Hawk, and landing. And then, we got all of the cameras off, and we shot us going into the building and then going through all those bits in the building. It was pretty nuts, but it was organized chaos because the guys running it are so they are so organized. It just feels very manic. I love it because it keeps you in it. You’re shooting it very quickly and it’s relentless. Outside of the Black Hawk stuff, that final action piece in the building, we did all of that in less than a week. We were really quick in that location.

There were a lot of twists and turns this season. What most surprised you about where everything went? Was there a reveal that you were particularly surprised by, either with your story arc or with anybody else’s story arc?

HOPPER: My wife (Laura Hopper) turns up. That surprised me. My wife got cast in the show as Harper, who helps me save Katie’s life. That was a big booster for me. It was great that we got to do that together. That’s a really accurate medical scene. We had field medics that put us through exactly what it would be like to save someone’s life who’d been shot in that situation, so that medical scene is a really accurate telling. Because I knew the book, I knew where a lot of things were going, so not a huge amount surprised me. I didn’t expect to have the really long scene with Haverford at the start of the season. I love that they put that in because it’s a really great callback to Dark Wolf. The intensity of Raife and Haverford says a lot because they both keep their cards close to their chest. They’re of the same ilk. They’re cut from the same cloth.

Tom Hopper Would Love To Tackle ‘Savage Son’ in Another Season of ‘The Terminal List’

"That was the first The Terminal List franchise book that I read, and I fell in love with it."

Image via Prime Video

There’s the main Terminal List series, and then there’s the prequel Dark Wolf. Showrunner David DiGilio told me that he thought Dark Wolf would be at least a three-season arc, and this series doesn’t feel like it’s ending anytime soon. Are you just going to be a part of this world for as long as Raife is a part of this story?

HOPPER: I don’t know. I could be doing this until I’m in my 50s, at this rate. I said to (author) Jack Carr, when we were talking about it, that it’s limitless, in terms of the franchise elements of the show. You can go prequel or you can go spin-off. I would love to do Savage Son. I think Savage Son is a brilliant book. That was the first The Terminal List franchise book that I read, and I fell in love with it. That’s the one that I would love to get to. In terms of Dark Wolf, I don’t know whether Raife would carry on in Dark Wolf. I feel like him and Ben’s story ended there, as much as I would love to work with Taylor again because we’re such good buds and I loved acting with him. We had such a great time and created good work, but I think for the good of the story, that’s where Raife and Ben’s story ended. That’s why it’s so good. It was a proper breakup. Dark Wolf was there for that relationship.

When you think of challenging and exciting roles to play, as an actor, it certainly seems as though twins would be high on that list. What was it like to do that for Better and to establish them as two separate characters while also making them similar?

HOPPER: The premiere for that is on the 17th at the Newport Beach Film Festival. The film is going through the sales process right now, so it will probably get a release in Q1 of next year. It was the most crazy process on anything I’ve ever done because so many of the scenes were with myself. I’m literally talking to a body double. And then, my wife Laura, who’s in the movie with me, was doing my other lines to the side of me. I was imagining my future performance to react to, and then when I was doing the other side, I was reacting to my past performance. I was just living in these two characters’ heads all the time and then doing multiple changes a day between the two twins.

It was certainly the biggest test for me, as an actor. It was one of the most enjoyable processes because what I look for, as an actor, are challenges. I want to be challenged. I want to read a script and go, “That’s going to be hard, and I want to rise to the challenge.” What’s what I seek, all the time. I’m always trying to push those boundaries to what I can do. I always want to think, “I’m not capable of that.” I want to be scared. That’s the kind of thing that makes me dive in headfirst and try to prove myself wrong. The reason I want to do any job is because I want to have a great experience on it. It’s the experience that I want to have making it. The watching is for everyone else. I don’t do it so that I can enjoy watching it. I do it for an audience and what they will get out of it.

For me, it’s all about the making of it, and we were so lucky on that movie. We produced that movie ourselves, with our producing partners at Dash productions, Daniel Sharp and Anna O’Malley, and it was also Dan’s directorial debut. I just think he’s a hidden gem of a director. He was one of the best directors I’ve ever worked with, and it was his first time. I had such great support with them, as my partners on that movie. We’re really proud of it.

Do you know what you’re going to be shooting next?

HOPPER: Yeah. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say because it’s not been announced yet. I’m doing a movie next month that’s a real nod to my love of [Steven] Spielberg-esque movies and also my obsession with UAPs/UFOs and that whole world. I’ll say no more than that, but it’s a beautiful script and has a real Close Encounters/Spielberg energy to it. I’m really excited about that one.

Tom Hopper Is Ready To Keep Playing Raife Hastings in ‘The Terminal List’ Universe

"I love playing Raife."

Image via Prime Video

Have they told you at all when you might get to play Raife again?

HOPPER: We have an idea. I know what the plan is, and I say, “Cool, you let me know.” I’m on hold to find out when the official go date is. They haven’t announced the official next season pick-up yet. I love playing Raife. I said to Jack and to Chris Pratt, “I love being a part of this world. You give me a call when you want me to come in and play him, and I’m there.”

The Terminal List is available to stream on Prime Video.