‘Mayor of Kingstown’: Laura Benanti on Why Prison Shooting Scene Was ‘Terrifying’ to Film

[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for Mayor of Kingstown Season 4, Episode 9, “Teeth and Tissue.”]

If Cindy (Laura Benanti) wasn’t already acclimated to the gruesomeness of Kingstown before, the events of this week’s episode of Mayor of Kingstown sure did the trick. Sunday’s (December 21) newest run saw her fellow CO Will Breen (Matthew Del Negro) go off the deep end after being relegated to restricted duty and then assigned to clean up after an adseg inmate who smeared feces around his cell. After being taunted by some of the prisoners, Breen returned with a shotgun and started taking out the inmates and guards alike, one by one.

When he got to Kyle McLusky’s (Taylor Handley) cell, Kyle didn’t flinch. After losing Tracy to a truly vicious murderer, he wasn’t afraid of being shot himself. However, Cindy intervened just in time to save him and took Breen out.

Filming that scene, Laura Benanti told TV Insider, was a legitimately frightening experience.

“It was scary. It was genuinely terrifying to film,” she said. “I’d never shot a gun before, and I’m not sure she did in her two weeks of training that they give them [either], but I doubt one thinks they’re going to have to use it in that way and, frankly, on a fellow corrections officer.”

Benanti said that despite her inexperience, Cindy was motivated by her desire to protect both herself and Kyle, but it still wasn’t easy for her to pull that trigger.

“She didn’t really know his past,” she explained of her character’s opinion of the oddball Breen. “There were murmurings of it, but I think people also say things about people that aren’t necessarily true, and she keeps her head down. So to have to kill someone that she had the most interaction with in her time there is not an easy choice to make, but the only choice to make.”

And while Benanti doesn’t regard her character as some “wide-eyed ingenue” who was wholly innocent before she joined the ranks at Anchor Bay, she did agree that pulling the trigger would forever change Cindy, no matter how necessary it was.

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“I don’t think she was ever innocent. I think that the relationships that she had in the past and the things that she had to go through, I wouldn’t say hardened her, but I think she has an outer shell that is necessary to protect not only herself but her family. But at a certain point, I feel like when you are just tenderized like meat, there is actually a softness that ends up happening. And I think that’s what we get to see for her. We see her do the scariest thing that a human could probably ever do, or one of them, and then finally allow herself to feel the weight of it, and what that does to her and to her heart and her feelings of safety,” Benanti explained. “I don’t think it hardens her. I think in a weird way, it softens her, because she’s allowing herself finally to feel feelings that I think she’s been holding in for a very long time.”

Mayor of Kingstown, Sundays, Paramount+