ComingSoon spoke to The Terminal List star Tyner Rushing, who is coming off a role in the latest season of Stranger Things. Rushing discussed her character in the show, working with Chris Pratt, and what it’s like to have both projects releasing so close together. The series is out July 1 on Prime Video.
“It follows James Reece after his entire platoon of Navy SEALs is ambushed during a high-stakes covert mission,” reads the synopsis. “Reece returns home to his family with conflicting memories of the event and questions about his culpability. However, as new evidence comes to light, Reece discovers dark forces working against him, endangering not only his life but the lives of those he loves.”
What about the script really drew you to this project and the role of Liz?
Oh, that’s a great question. I auditioned for this show. I probably would’ve done anything that this team was producing. I mean, what a great group of people; Antoine Fuqua, Chris Pratt, David DiGilio. It’s just such an inspiring group. This specifically, I was excited about it because I personally had never gotten to channel this sort of “OG” part of myself, this little country girl from Alabama, you know? So to get, to bring that to a character, to Liz, was just a cool exercise. It felt fun, it felt freeing, and it felt like a gift to my inner child.
It sounds silly, but yeah, also the fact that she’s so different from me and this life that she lives — I mean, she’s a private pilot, she’s a former Kiowa helicopter pilot, is something I didn’t know anything about. So to get to learn about that stuff, do all the prep that we did for the show and for her. It was a huge learning experience where I got to really empathize with that way of life. I just didn’t know anything about it before.
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You have some great scenes as the series goes on with Chris Pratt. Can you speak to working with him and how you found the on-screen chemistry to work off of each other?
I think that it was there from the get-go with us. We had a chemistry read over Zoom during the audition process, and it felt palpable even there, even over the computer. It just felt like the right fit. It felt like we had the same ideas for who Liz Riley was and what we wanted their relationship to look like, and the heart that they bring to one another. So that friendship just felt like it was there from the beginning. I was like, “I just want to be buddies with this guy, on-screen and off-screen.” So that made my job really easy. It made it easy to act because I felt it naturally.
This is such an exciting period for your career, with Stranger Things just released and now this is coming out. They’re both such bingeable shows. What is it like having all this happen at the same time? The reaction has to be intense when everybody’s consuming it.
That’s a good question. I just feel really grateful. I’m not going to lie, sometimes I get a bit of that imposter syndrome or like, “why me?” Or whatever, but I mostly feel grateful to be a part of so many projects that I really respect and care about, and just hope that I get to work on something next that fills me up as much as these have.