‘The Hunting Party’: Melissa Roxburgh & Josh Dallas Manifested Their ‘Twisted’ Reunion (VIDEO)

For four seasons, Melissa Roxburgh and Josh Dallas played siblings on NBC’s thrilling sci-fi series Manifest, which ended in 2023. Now, Dallas is guest starring on Roxburgh’s action-packed drama as one of the killers her character, ex-FBI profiler Rebecca “Bex” Henderson, is secretly hunting with her team. He’s yet another escapee from the Pit, a prison no one knew existed. And while the world thinks those inmates are dead, Bex and her team seek to wrangle the bloodthirsty murderers.

They are enemies on The Hunting Party in the Thursday, April 2, episode, but in real life, Roxburgh and Dallas are close pals. (They even celebrated Dallas’ birthday on-set together.) “His ability to play and laugh brings so much joy to each set he’s on,” Roxburgh raves of her costar. “He’s one of best people I know and one of my best friends.” Watch the video above with Roxburgh and Dallas to see just that.

Dallas, too, was delighted to step into this new world and work alongside Roxburgh again. “She’s like my sister in real life. And we have this shorthand from Manifest that makes everything feel immediate and alive. We don’t have to ‘find’ each other on set, we’re already there,” he shares, adding that returning to NBC (where Manifest aired before moving to Netflix) “feels like coming home — except with a much darker suitcase this time!”

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That’s because there’s none the “warmth and trust” that there was on Manifest. Dallas plays Elliot Carr, aka the Connecticut Cobbler, a shoemaker whose custom designs include materials harvested from alligators, rhinos and…people he’s skinned alive. When we visited the NBC drama’s set prior to the Season 2 premiere, Roxburgh called this killer “the creepiest one” yet.

Executive producer JJ Bailey added at the time of the episode that hadn’t been filmed yet, “My hope is that it will land the way it’s intended. It’s a killer who starts off very twisted psychologically, and The Pit actually has a positive impact on this killer, but there’s an unintended consequence of that positive impact. You could say he’s made a lot of progress, but he is continuing to kill, but in a new way. It’s sort of our twist on maybe how healed a serial killer can actually be, and that journey is really bizarre and fun.”

Dallas says that Elliot’s been left with “a warped sense of remorse” after the Pit “rewired him. They put him through a brutal treatment where he’s repeatedly marched to his own execution only to have it called off at the last possible second. Over and over and over again…for years. And it broke him in a very specific way, so he comes out… altered. And when he’s out, what’s scary is he’s not simply ‘back to his old ways.’ His psychology has shifted. The obsession is still there. The craft, the ritual, the need to dominate.”

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With that “tangled up” with that twisted remorse, his “murders evolve and his methodology changes in a really unsettling way. He starts targeting people who are already injured, almost like he’s trying to convince himself that he’s not causing death, he’s ‘intervening,'” Dallas previews. “It’s definitely a twisted logic, but to Elliot it’s a kind of morality. Which makes it even scarier. Without giving away the whole thing, there’s a jaw dropping escalation where Elliott’s ‘craft’ turns inward and what looks like a threat may actually be his idea of an apology!”

As for what to expect from Bex and Elliot’s dynamic, “it’s tension, chess, and this sense that one wrong move changes the whole thing. Melissa is so grounded and smart in this role, she becomes the calm center of gravity. My character Elliott is used to being the weather in the room and suddenly there’s someone who won’t let him change the forecast,” Dallas explains. “So every scene turns into this standoff where she’s steady and he’s scrambling to get power back. And that’s what makes their scenes so fun — in the most disturbing way. Bex is one of the few people who can actually reach him… which means she’s also one of the few people who can truly threaten him.”

He adds, “Bex tries to treat him like a human being and pull him toward accountability, while Elliot keeps trying to turn it into a game where he gets to control the narrative.”

Watch the video above for much more from Melissa Roxburgh and Josh Dallas on working together again.

The Hunting Party, Thursdays, 10/9c, NBC