Spoilers for Bloodline’s first season are below.
If you watched Bloodline Season 1 – and there’s literally no reason why you shouldn’t have, given its excellence – then you know very few TV families had a rougher time last year than the Rayburns. It’s even hard to decide who had it worst within the family, though Danny would probably win the vote, but actor Kyle Chandler was suffering quite a bit himself for one scene, although it wasn’t the material that was the problem. During a set visit earlier this year, the actor spoke with me and other press outlets and shared his most challenging scene to film.
Probably that last, I mean, physically the last scene, because I had what the guy said was as close to pneumonia as you can get, and I had some family matters that took place, and it was a hard. The end of the year was just hard, but it was very rewarding and everything came out great.
A consummate professional, that guy, unable to go a full minute talking about negative things without bouncing right back to the good side of the experience. (He then mentioned how filming in the Florida Keys was like being in Neverland.) Still, it doesn’t matter how blissful and magnificent one’s surroundings are if everything is going haywire inside one’s body and mind.
Bloodline is a show where emotions run high when these characters are at their calmest, so by the time the last episode came around, the mental state of each of the Rayburns was fractured and filed down to sharp edges. Everyone was dealing with the aftermath of Danny’s death, as well as the tangled mess that he made before that, and it ended up getting made all the more complicated with the arrival of Danny’s son Nolan. And Kyle Chandler, with his head wrapped around the problem afflicting both his fictional family and his real family, looked like this.
From now on, my daily goal is to be in “Kyle Chandler when he’s embracing the flu” shape, since that's still way better than what I got going.
The actor also went on to say that the hardest part of the production as a whole was actually being away from his family, which he admitted was the case for most actors, and he was not an exception there. But as terrible a time as it was for the Emmy-winning actor to pull it off, perhaps the physical fatigue and mental strain actually helped his performance out there in the end. It definitely didn’t hurt.
Bloodline Season 2 will premiere on Netflix on Friday, May 27, at 12:00 a.m. To see when everything else is hitting Netflix in the coming months, check out our premiere schedule, and then don’t forget to hit up our summer TV schedule for everything else coming to your small screens.
