The Flight Attendant’s Griffin Matthews Talks This Week’s Season Finale, Wanting to Play a Superhero, and More

Since its debut on Thanksgiving Day, The Flight Attendant has grown from a fledgling HBO Max series to a buzzworthy phenomenon, with fans getting thrown into its engrossing mystery. Based on Chris Bohjalian’s 2018 novel of the same name, the series follows Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco), a New York woman who serves as a stewardess on a major airline. After meeting Alex Sokolov (Michiel Huisman) a businessman on one of her airline’s flights to Bangkok, the pair spend the night together — and Cassie wakes up the next morning to find him dead in the bed next to her, with no recollection of what happened. As Cassie returns to the United States, she begins to uncover a conspiracy surrounding Alex’s death, one that affects a lot of people in her orbit.

Among those people is Shane (Griffin Matthews), a fellow flight attendant and friend of Cassie’s who becomes an unexpected foil in her increasingly-chaotic life. Matthews is no stranger to engrossing television roles, with a filmography that includes Dear White People, Ballers, and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He also has been a trailblazer in the theater space, making headlines earlier this year for calling out the racism he faced while developing his musical Witness Uganda, which was later retitled to Invisible Thread upon its Off-Broadway run. With The Flight Attendant, Matthews’ talent has now been showcased for a whole new audience, while making some major steps towards onscreen Black and LGBTQ+ representation along the way.

In anticipation of The Flight Attendant‘s finale, ComicBook.com got a chance to chat with Matthews about all things tied to the series, and what fans can expect going into the last episode. He also spoke about filming the internationally-set series (especially amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic), his dynamic with Cuoco, and why he definitely wants to play a superhero.

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ComicBook.com: What drew you to this project and this show? It seems like such an interesting story to be a part of.

Griffin Matthews: First of all, I’ve never read the book. We were encouraged, when we signed on to do it, to not read the book, because the actual show strays from the book, and they did not want us to know what happens in the book and stay true to what was on the page on the script. So I didn’t read the book, but what I did know about it was that there was a murder in Bangkok, and there were flight attendants, and I got to be a part of it, and everybody had secrets. For me, that’s enough juiciness to sign up and dive headfirst. That was kind of my initial introduction to the piece.

And then, when I found out who was attached at the time – I think I was one of the last roles that had gotten cast – it was like “Please, dear God, let me get in on that.”

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I really love your dynamic with Kaley, especially in the episode with the memorial service. I think like you guys’ rapport is so much fun to watch. What was it like to find that dynamic? I was reading in other interviews that the second you guys met, you instantly connected with each other.

It really was. It sounds so lame, but sometimes in life, you meet people and there are no barriers to entry. It was one of those meetings where we were friends from the door, and it felt like that was the dynamic that had to be onscreen, and [the audience] had to believe in their friendship. For whatever reason, Kaley and I, when we met, we were friends from the door. I met her in a chemistry read with all the producers and all the writers. It was a very intimidating moment, but she was so warm. She’s so warm and she’s so silly, and I think that I’m kind of warm and silly, and I think that’s why we just clicked.

We talked a lot about bringing that friendship to light onscreen, and it was about bringing our warmth and silliness to the screen. The life between “action” and “cut”, and then our sitting around and waiting for the next shot, we tried to make that life all one, so that the audience really could get on board with the complications of their friendship inside of this insane murder mystery.

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I really love how Shane feels like so much more than just your typical kind of gay best friend sort of character. I know you are very vocal in your work and online about representation in the media, and especially black gay representation. Did that influence your take on Shane at all? It’s so interesting how dynamic he’s able to be, even if he’s not on screen the entire series.

It is my go-to space when I get cast in something, to try to bring humanity. What I realized inside of the series — I knew that Shane had a secret. I knew that he had to be more complex than just the gay best friend, and I knew they wanted me to make him as complex as I could. So they were really open, our writer Steve Yockey and [our showrunners] Meredith Lavender and Marcie Ulin, they were really open to my interpretation and my ideas. Kaley and I had a lot of side conversations about who I thought Shane was and needed to be, and what needed to be represented onscreen. I really give them a lot of credit, because the movement doesn’t happen all alone, right? You can’t actually push the boundary without a lot of people all putting their heads down and doing the work to push those boundaries with you. And to their credit, they really did an amazing job supporting me.

I also had a question yesterday about the intimacy stuff [on the show], because I’m kissing men onscreen. There were even conversations around trying to carefully, thoughtfully express Shane as a whole person, even inside of intimate moments with other men. We’re still not at the point where we can take that kind of thing for granted, and what that means on a television series when you see two men kissing. We’re still not quite ready to take that for granted. And I didn’t take it for granted as an actor. And also when we invited other actors to set to participate, there were real conversations that happened behind the scenes just about respect and what does it mean.

I think that that queer representation matters, and certainly inside a series that has been getting as much attention as The Flight Attendant. And truthfully, for me, every time we get to do a little moment on screen, I think it pushes the boundary. I’m in the Will and Grace generation, and that, unknowingly – watching reruns and syndication of Will and Grace [after school] – it just pushed the narratives. It pushes the politics. It just gives us some more insight into what’s real and what we’re capable of in society.

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What surprised you the most while working on The Flight Attendant?

I have such a boring answer. My boring answer is I was surprised how easy it was. We really got along, the cast. I know that sounds dumb, but it is not always the case. We were flying around the world together, which is also not the case in most shows. You’re not spending that much intimate time with each other. We were on many, many planes, through many, many times zones, in our pajamas, in our real life. We were doing that with each other. I call it the adult summer camp. And I think the chemistry of the cast shows on the screen, and it’s because we really were traveling the world together. We were on that adventure together.

I think the other surprise, truly, is that people love the show. We loved the show, but we didn’t know if anybody else was going to love the show. I didn’t. You make something, and you pray to God that people like it. The reception has been quite insane, and I feel really proud of what we made. It also took us a year to make it, because of COVID. And we shot the thing out of order – like what should have been our third episode, we shot the finale. So it was a crazy process. It took us a long time, but we’re really proud of it.

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What has it been like to see the response to the series? Especially in a moment where there isn’t a lot of new dramatic television to watch, it feels so escapist and so easy to get sucked into. What has it been like to see fans resonate with that?

Yeah, Kaley and I were talking about that the other day, we were just talking about the timing of the show. We were supposed to air in April, I believe, originally, and we got shut down because of COVID. So the fact that we have a show on the air that is traveling when we can’t travel and that is an escape when we can’t escape, I think it’s certainly helped us to get eyeballs on the show.

The thing that I am most surprised about is my mother likes it. That’s like the shock. If my mom likes the show, I’m like “Okay.” My mom is not a TV [person]. She likes the nightly news. That’s what my mom’s escape is. And so the fact that my mom is watching The Flight Attendant, and that she is trying to figure out who did it.

I get so many questions on my social media and in my DMs about people’s theories about who did it, and I kind of love that it feels like we’re all in like one big game together. Right now, we’re all looking for things that unite us, through the madness of 2020 and it seems to be doing that.

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Is there anything you can tease for the rest of the series, particularly with regards to Shane?

What I’m able to say is that episode eight, the finale of the show, for me, was the reason that I wanted to do the show. Even when we were filming it, I turned to Kaley and I was like, “This is why I wanted to do the show.” It’s that good. It’s that juicy. What can I say? It’s a new opportunity for me on television for people that look like me, that talk like me. It’s just new, and I felt really proud of that.

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Some of your co-stars on The Flight Attendant have dipped into the world of superheroes — like Kaley has Harley Quinn and Rosie [Perez] was in Birds of Prey. Is there a superhero, or any sort of franchise like that, that you would love to be a part of?

Oh my God, this question. It’s so interesting that you asked that because we’re inside of this conversation about representation. It’s what we’ve been doing for all of 2020, just talking about black lives and black gay lives. I loved Black Panther so, so, so much. And I just want there to be gay people on screen. I want to be a goddamn superhero. I think it’d be so cool to enter that world, because it just feels like we don’t exist in that world. We don’t exist in that space. When I was growing up, I never saw myself. I loved Spider-Man. I loved Batman. I saw all of those films, and I loved those films, but I never saw myself. The closest thing I could say was “Maybe I’ll be Robin.”

And I would just love in 2021, in the new year, I would love to really see some queer representation. And honest to God, I would love, love, love to do it, with my little skinny body and a lack of muscle. I want to be a superhero.

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The Flight Attendant‘s season finale will debut Thursday, December 17th exclusively on HBO Max.