Ozark showrunner Chris Mundy and star Laura Linney were joined by Jason Bateman, via Zoom, to discuss the Netflix series at Deadline’s Contenders TV.
“The back half of the season is really about active choices,” says Mundy, “do Marty and Wendy really want to stay together, do the kids really want to be a part of this family… so it really all sort of circles in on itself in terms of family, and what they’re willing to do to try to stay together, and whether or not that’s a good choice.”
Jason Bateman stars as Marty Byrde, a Chicago financial adviser laundering money for a Mexican drug cartel, who moves his family to the Ozarks when things go awry. Working with his politically savvy wife (Laura Linney) and a teenage local (Julia Garner) to appease the cartel, Byrde tangles with local criminals, while striving to protect his kids, and keep his family together.
“[Marty] always felt like he was a bit smarter than he was,” says Bateman, “like he’d gain a little intelligence in each episode but never really enough to get them out of it by the next episode. Here we are at the end and I think he’s gotten smart enough, or become ethical enough, to be done with it all, but I don’t think he or the family are at the place he thought they’d be at, and he’s forced to be humble a little bit.”
“What I love that happens in this season is that the families become sort of encapsulated within themselves,” says Linney, “the Byrdes, the Navarros, the Langmores, and you get the sense of these three different cultures in these three different families dealing with similar issues about survival and need and greed… and to see how they each deal with it separately, as family units, is really interesting.”
Ozark’s final season was split into two parts, with part one having been released on January 21st and part two releasing on April 29th on Netflix.
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