Warning: This post contains spoilers for Season 1 of Ride or Die.
At the start of Ride or Die, Prime Video’s action-packed, globetrotting buddy dramedy, Debbie (Octavia Spencer) is angry with her best friend Judith (Hannah Waddingham) for keeping a big secret from her — just a small thing about Judith actually being an international assassin. In reality, though, Spencer would probably be fine if her co-star was a bit more tight-lipped: turns out that Waddingham spoiled Season 1’s most shocking death for her ahead of time.
Prior to production, the actresses hadn’t discussed the fact that neither of them likes to read scripts too far ahead; both only want to know what their character knows when filming. “When I finally found out, I told her, ‘My god, I’m doing the thing where Billy’s throat is cut,’” Waddingham recalls. “And she was like, ‘He what?’ I was like, ‘Oh, sorry.’”
Allow us to explain: In Episode 7, Debbie’s plan to make a large withdrawal from a Geneva bank and help Interpol arrest her crooked politician husband’s Albanian mob associates in exchange for immunity goes sideways when Judith’s nemesis — fellow assassin Ana (Sylvia Hoeks) — shows up and causes chaos with smoke bombs. Ana kidnaps Debbie as gunfire breaks out between the Albanians and Interpol.
Judith then runs through bullets trying to reach the car driven by bad boy Billy (Ed Skrein), her target turned surprisingly loyal ally… and potential love interest. Interpol agent Jacques (Jacky Ido) shoots the Albanian crime boss, repaying Judith for saving his life earlier. A bit cliché, you think. Then Judith reaches the vehicle and climbs in yelling for Billy to start the bleeping car. She turns to face him and… he’s dead.
Series creator Tessa Coates and showrunner Matt Miller always knew Billy had to die — a poetic fate for a character who’d been marked from the get-go and endeared himself to everyone along the way.
“We were trying to build in this big hero’s death for ages,” Coates says. “And then it became so much more tragic and so much worse that it happens off-camera. It meant nothing to Ana. She wasn’t even planning on doing it, but she knew that Judith liked him, and so she got him as an extra twist of the knife. I gasp every time I see it. Poor boy.”
“It’s quite shocking, because you’re seeing the surprise of it for the first time through Judith’s eyes,” Miller adds. “And Hannah’s wonderful.”
The tears came easy to Waddingham. “Because Ed has just done such an amazing job, you’ve fallen in love with Billy, and his silliness, and his hotness, and the relationship he has separately with Debbie as well,” she says. “They go through all this stuff together. Judith’s had that moment with him up on the roof, and you think when this is over, we’ll get [them disappearing together to his place in Cambodia], and then suddenly he’s gone. It made my job very easy.”
More difficult for Waddingham was filming Ana’s ultimate revenge. Years earlier, Judith had shot her former colleague and left her for dead after Ana told her Debbie had to die. Now Ana wants Judith to suffer. She drugs Judith, then makes her listen as their boss and pseudo father figure, the Director (Bill Nighy), is given a choice: he can order Ana to kill Judith, or Judith lives and Ana destroys his agency. Given the go-ahead, Ana locks Judith inside a coffin-like furnace that she’s rigged to provide enough oxygen and nutrients to keep her alive for a couple of years.
“The isolation of it all… I have to say, as somebody who’s not a fan of that since being waterboarded in Game of Thrones [as Septa Unella], I was very bothered by it,” Waddingham says of having to play temporarily immobile, mute, and blind due to a neurotoxin. “But Tessa and Matt, our props team, all of them, couldn’t have been more understanding that I absolutely wanted to lean into that but was fearful of it. I think it’s ended up as something that everyone will feel claustrophobic about, and that’s really great in this instance.”
It took Coates and Miller time to land on that haunting scenario for the long-awaited face-to-face. “In its original iteration, it was like this huge shoot-‘em-up with hundreds of assassins showing up and Ana and Judith having this violent showdown. Then we ran out of money,” Coates says, laughing.
“But we thought, we’ve done so much gunplay and fighting — an we do something more powerful?” she continues. “When we thought of it, I cried, because what an incredibly scary idea that you can’t escape and you can’t die, and for multiple years you’re in the pitch black all alone. And again, Hannah’s amazing in there.”
Judith does manage to detach the breathing tube. Just before she suffocates, Debbie arrives at the abandoned training facility to free her. Ana sees their car speeding away and gives chase, determined to ram them off a cliff. Debbie shoots a grappling hook into the grille of Ana’s car, connecting them, and she and Judith jump out before both cars go airborne into the canyon below.
Miller was adamant from the beginning that the friends should have their own Thelma & Louise moment. “We had so many mad ideas for how we were going to get them staying alive and going over this cliff,” Coates says. “We did not finalize that sequence until we were shooting Episode 5. It was like two o’clock in the morning, and we were on a golf cart trying to work out if Judith and Debbie could change seats and would it be believable that a grappling hook has the weight to attach. That went through so many different iterations of how Ana was going to die.”
Coates considers herself lucky that she hadn’t seen Thelma & Louise until maybe five years ago. “I’d managed to move through my life without knowing that they die, and so I truly screamed, I couldn’t believe that they went over the cliff,” she says. Righting that wrong, 35 years after the film’s 1991 release, wasn’t her intention, but Coates is happy that some viewers see that as the takeaway: “That is so telling that the times have moved on, that that doesn’t feel your only option.”
Spencer views the sequence more as a metaphor for life. “Debbie and Judith went off the cliff when they fell in love with each other as friends, and then when faced with life or death without each other, they choose to go over the cliff, but in a way, that saves them both,” the Oscar winner notes, adding that she’s an English major who likes to read into things. “They’re each other’s life raft. I see what Judith does for a living as an embodiment of all women, having to juggle all of these things. And what Debbie does for a living, having to juggle all of these things. It culminates into this moment where [you wonder], ‘Are they going to fight for this friendship, because it’s the last thing that they have?’”
“They find their way back to each other,” Waddingham adds. “Somebody who’s never done anything like this is speaking with somebody who’s so experienced. But there are things that Judith is a novice about, and Debbie is so experienced. So they are constantly crossing over all the time.”
The season finale ends with Debbie and Judith meeting on a train. Lawyer Debbie is off for a two-week ramble before she relaunches her legal career, and Judith is headed to Cambodia to give herself the distance to find out who she truly is. “Here’s to new adventures,” Debbie toasts, seemingly unaware that several people on the train appear ready to ambush them. “Oh, we’re only getting started,” Judith responds.
While the show has yet to be officially renewed, the producers have definitely been pondering a second season. “We would pick up directly with the train, however, Season 2 would be a totally new story,” Miller shares. “So we’d have new bad guys, new villains, new danger, and new countries that Debbie and Judith are visiting, because part of the show is this wanderlust. And without giving away too many spoilers, there’d be a wedding.”
Personally, we’re hoping there might be a romantic future for Debbie and Interpol agent Jacques, who’d presumably still be in the picture. After all, Queenie (Savannah Steyn) has joined forces with Interpol to go undercover as the Director’s newest recruit in an effort to bring him down and make him pay for not being able to keep her mother, his former operative and lover, safe from a vengeful Ana.
Will Queenie tell handler Sam (Calam Lynch), who’s now been forced to stay at the agency and train her, her true intentions? And what happens if/when the Director — who considers emotional attachments a weakness — discovers his biological daughter Queenie is betraying him?
That’s a question that intrigues Nighy. For now, he’s just hoping the Director would get to pull his weapon again on someone after firing at Ana in Season 1. “That’s only the second time in my professional career, which is quite long, that I’ve ever shot a gun,” he says. “So I was quite pleased about that, and I’m looking forward to more. I want to do a bit more gun work.”
