When Rhona Mitra signed on to star in the new season of “Strike Back,” she wanted to achieve one goal among all others.
“The key thing of this show is that they’re praised for the legitimacy and authenticity of both Phil and Sully’s approach to their characters, so the pressure that I felt that I wasn’t dropping the ball or lowering the bar was considerable,” she told me during a conversation at San Diego Comic Con in July. “I wanted to make sure that I was keeping a certain standard in the credibility that was already set. I couldn’t mess up on that.”
Mitra plays Major Rachel Dalton, an MI-6 spy who at the beginning of the season boldly pushed her way into the special ops division Section 20 not as a new agent, but the boss who oversees, among others, the main operatives Stonebridge (Philip Winchester) and Scott (Sullivan Stapleton). Mitra, who has starred as butt-kicking women in such films as “Underworld: Rise of the Lycans” and “Doomsday,” as well as stints on TV’s “SGU” and “The Gates,” easily handles the role of a tough taskmaster and expert covert agent. (Just check out her interrogation of the man in the clip above from Ep. 15, debuting at 9 p.m. CT Sept. 7 on Cinemax.)
Mitra’s desire to look like the real deal while in battle mode was a taller order, considering the whirlwind filming schedule in South Africa and other African locations.
“We had an incredibly brief amount of time to get everything together as far as training was concerned,” she said. “It was a baptism by fire, for sure.”
