Spoilers for Season 3, Episode 5 of Mayor of Kingstown are ahead! If you aren’t caught up, you can stream the show with a Paramount+ subscription, and make sure to catch new episodes as they air every Sunday on the 2024 TV schedule.
When it comes to Iris on Mayor of Kingstown, she’s still a big mystery. While we’ve seen Emma Laird’s character make shocking decisions for three seasons now, and we’ve gotten to know her a bit through her relationship with Mike, when it comes to her past, it’s one big question mark. However, that changed in Season 3, Episode 5, when we found out Iris has a history with Konstantin and witnessed the “intense” and “awkward” interaction between her, this season’s big bad, and Jeremy Renner’s Mayor. Now, we’ve learned more about what it took to shoot that scene from Laird herself, so let’s break it down.
Throughout the first half of Kingstown’s latest episode, we see Iris and Konstantin catching up, and we learn that they have a rich history – however, the specifics of how they know each other are still unknown. Like the viewers, Mike learned about this connection in this installment, and Emma Laird told me during an interview with CinemaBlend that shooting this interaction was intense, partly because she’s very close with both actors:
It was so intense. It was so awkward. Like me and Jeremy, I was very fond of Jeremy from the day that I met him and we've always spent a lot of time together in and outside of the show. And it was just really funny, I'd done a lot of scenes with [Yorick van Wageningen], he plays Konstantin and we'd got really close, like we would just cuddle in between takes. We'd lay down on his bed, we'd share stories. It was so platonically intimate.
In the show, both Mike and Konstantin clearly care for Iris, and it sounds like the same is true when it comes to how Renner and van Wageningen feel about Laird. This confrontational moment was the first time all three were in a room together, and it was clear that their histories with Iris were making matters complicated as Mike tried to negotiate with Konstantin about the drug poisonings before the bar they were in got shot up.
The actress behind Iris told me that it was the first scene they also shot together, and that it was a “really tense day,” explaining:
And then this scene was the first scene that we had with Jeremy seeing that. It was just like, Yorick didn't really know how to, he was like, what he was really scared. He had not really met Jeremy, and he was like asking me questions. Like, I don't know, like, ‘Does he like me? I feel like it's really tense.’ And I was like ‘It is.’ It was just a really tense day on set. And sometimes the heat of the scene kind of, you feel the scene. But maybe it was real as well. But it was very entertaining.
In the scene, Iris is literally and figuratively kind of stuck between Mike and Konstantin, and as the episode progresses, it is revealed that she is going to work as a double agent of sorts to get intel for Renner’s character. However, her real motives are still a mystery, making matters even more intense and potentially awkward.
Much like the death of Mike’s mom and the cars exploding at KPD, the thread introduced through Mike, Iris and Konstantin’s tense meeting at the bar is sure to impact the rest of the show.
To see what happens between these three connected and competing folks, and to learn more about Iris’ past with Konstantin, make sure to tune into new episodes of Mayor of Kingstown every Sunday on Paramount+.
