“I need to find the Peacemaker. He killed my son,” General Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) says in the trailer for Peacemaker season 2. The self-loathing jingoistic mercenary (John Cena) expressed remorse over killing American hero Rick Flag Jr. (Joel Kinnaman) during a still-canon mission to Corto Maltese in 2021’s The Suicide Squad, admitting in a sob session that Flag was right to call him a “joke.” But as Chris Smith says in the trailer, “I don’t want to be a joke anymore. I want to be a real hero.”
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While Flag Sr. pursues Peacemaker over his use of the Quantum Unfolding Chamber — or the QUC, similar to the dangerous interdimensional technology that Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor operated in Superman — he’s also motivated by revenge. As a father himself, Grillo tells ComicBook how parenthood informed his performance.
“It’s impossible not to let it kind of saturate your being,” the actor, who first played the elder Flag in the animated Creature Commandos, says. “The way for me anyway when I prepare, it’s like, ‘What would I do in this situation? How would I be in this situation?’ So it’s hard not to think of [what I would do].”
“If it were me, I would be hellbent on getting this guy in the ground,” Grillo continues. “And that would probably blur a lot of other things around me, which is what I think Flag is dealing with.”
As the new director of A.R.G.U.S., and with agents like Sasha Bordeaux (Sol Rodríguez) and Langston Fleury (Tim Meadows) at his command, Flag is dealing with “having this new position and dealing with this power that he has, while still having this one major objective,” Grillo says. “Which is to annihilate Peacemaker and to use everyone around me, with my authority, to get that done.”
Series creator and The Suicide Squad writer-director James Gunn previously defended Peacemaker killing Flag, who threatened to expose the truth about Amanda Waller’s (Viola Davis) Project Starfish and the US government’s involvement with the starfish-like alien Starro the Conqueror.
“People constantly are writing on Twitter about how awful [Peacemaker] is and how mad they are that he killed Rick Flag — and I may get s–t for saying this — but what he was doing, he had a reason for doing it,” Gunn said back in 2022. “He kills Rick Flag in The Suicide Squad because there’s a piece of evidence that he believes will cause the world a great amount of disturbance and death and violence. He’s covering up the truth, so if you believe in the truth being out there no matter what, you definitely don’t agree with that.”
Peacemaker comes from “not a natural rights perspective, he comes from a utilitarian perspective,” Gunn added. “He believes that the world is better off without that bit of information [about Starro]. And if that means killing a guy he really likes and looks up to, he’s willing to do that.”
John Cena, Danielle Brooks, Jennifer Holland, Freddie Stroma, Steve Agee, and Robert Patrick return for season two, joined by new cast members Frank Grillo, David Denman, Sol Rodriguez, and Tim Meadows.
In Peacemaker season 2, Chris “discovers an alternate world where life is everything he wishes it could be,” a discovery that also “forces him to face his traumatic past and take the future into his own hands,” per the synopsis. James Gunn wrote all eight episodes of Peacemaker and directed three, including the first episode premiering August 21 on HBO Max.
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Image courtesy of Marvel Studios. -
Image Courtesy of Marvel Studios
