‘The Punisher’ Showrunner Breaks Down Monstrous Shootout

It wouldn’t be a season of The Punisher without a massive shootout…or two. One such scene in the sophomore season of The Punisher was so unique and interesting that it’s sure to stand out with Frank Castle fans everywhere.

ComicBook.com caught up with The Punisher showrunner and executive producer Steve Lightfoot to talk all things Castle, including one shootout in particular.

WARNING: Minor spoilers for The Punisher Season Two up ahead. Proceed with caution if you have yet to watch the latest 13 episodes of the Netflix hit.

While the season was home to several gnarly fights — like bashing in the faces of Russian gangsters with dumbbells — one scene stood out in particular. Castle (Jon Bernthal) and Amy Bendix (Giorgia Whigham) finally track down John Pilgrim (Josh Stewart) to a room at local hotel.

Once Castle arrives at the hotel, chaos ensues shortly thereafter in a beautifully-shot scene that includes Castle and Pilgrim blindly firing at each other through adjoining rooms. And to cap it all off, they threw in a classic Netflix elevator/hallway fight at the tail end.

Speaking with ComicBook.com, Lightfoot mentioned that the hotel fight was always intended to portray the two different lives Pilgrim has lived. Essentially one room represents Pilgrim’s family-first future while the other room represents the sins of a past life.

“When we were developing the scripts, we came to this idea that in a way Pilgrim, he stole the room from the guy nextdoor, it was full of drugs and booze, and the idea was that these two rooms became the warring sides of Pilgrim,” Lightfoot reflects. “There was the guy who used to be, that was a very tempting place to go back to, and then there was the one where he was now the family man who just wanted to get home.”

“It was almost the Jekyll room and the Hyde room,” continues Lightfoot. “Again, that is similar to Frank, we sort of we maintain that thematic, so when we got to the script for that episode, it made sense somehow for the fight to them happen in there, to see both these guys in both rooms.”

Lightfoot went on to detail how the scene was a living theme of how Castle and Pilgrim are very close to being the same person — how they each continue to live their murderous ways because of family.

“It was always this idea of mirroring, and then just having fun with the practicality of, you’re in that room, I’m in this room, how do we swap, how do we change it up,” Lightfoot says. “So we wrote a version into the scripts, that, if you like, was driven by theme and where we’d gotten these guys to, and then let the stunt coordinator and the guys loose on it.”

The producer made sure to mention that they built the hotel rooms as a set so they could do whatever they wanted during the scene, giving the stunt team free rein on coming up with the ultimate guns blazing shoot-out.

“We had built those two rooms as sets, so we weren’t in a real hotel, so we had carte blanche to do whatever we wanted with that location,” reveals Lightfoot. “So we wrote a version into the script, and then I said to the stunt guys, ‘Look, just run with it. And then come back, show me what you’ve got.’ And it came from them, refined it from there. We were shooting that sequence into the elevator, we were shooting that for quite a long time, that was a real labor of love.”

What’d you think of the blind hotel shoot-out? What about the season over all? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or join the conversation online by mentioning me (@AdamBarnhardt) on Twitter to talk all things Netflix’s Defendersverse — or what’s left of it!

The Punisher Season Two is now streaming on Netflix.