Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Terminal List.

Based on the best-selling novel by former Navy SEAL Jack Carr (who’s also an executive producer), the Amazon Studios original series The Terminal List follows James Reece (Chris Pratt), as he tries to piece unreliable memories together after his entire platoon of Navy SEALs is ambushed during a dangerous mission. Back home, questions surround who’s responsible for what happened and the deeper that Reece digs, the more he uncovers, further endangering the lives of those he loves.

During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, Constance Wu (who plays war correspondent and investigative journalist Katie Buranek) talked about why The Terminal List appealed to her, playing a character who’s always in search of the truth, and exploring the dynamic between Reece and Katie. She also spoke about wanting to diversify her career as much as possible, what drew her to Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, and her experience writing her upcoming memoir, Making a Scene.

Collider: When the opportunity to be a part of this came your way, what was the appeal to you?

CONSTANCE WU: There were a lot of things, when the offer first came to me, that I really liked. I really wanted to work with (director/executive producer) Antoine [Fuqua]. I really like his work. I thought the writing was really good. I liked that it shot in L.A., so I didn’t have to uproot my family. And I liked that the role was different from playing a stripper, which had been my previous role in Hustlers. I like to make my next job different from the last one. I did a stripper, and then I did a war correspondent, and next I’m doing a movie musical with Javier Barden that’s for children. I like to try different things, instead of always doing the same thing, and this was definitely something I’d never done before. It appeals to me, as an artist, to stretch my muscles in that way.

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Image via Amazon Studios

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Did this character feel like someone that you had a bit of freedom with, as far as what you wanted to bring to her?

WU: Yeah. That was definitely there in her personal character history, with her father, with how important journalistic integrity is for her, and with how she will use any means necessary to uncover the truth. That drive for the truth makes her motivations human rather than just some type of exposition.

As a journalist and photographer myself, I have always been in awe of journalists, photographers, and photojournalists, who go to war zones and do investigative reporting, in search of the truth, because it puts their lives at risk and they’re bound to ruffle feathers. How do you think her past as a war correspondent really affected and shaped her desire to always be in search of the truth, even at the risk of her own life?

WU: I think being a war correspondent and being on the ground makes the things that she’s reporting on become a little bit more real to her, rather than conceptual ideas or philosophies or theories, or even political opinion. She knows what happens on the ground. She has talked to some of these servicemen and women as humans, and knows about their relationships with each other and their family lives. That adds a depth that fuels her drive to do the best she can do about it.

Were there things that you dug into, with that aspect of her and her backstory, that impressed you, as far as what people in those positions do?

WU: Yeah, I really admire and like journalists that ask me questions that make me think in a different way, and playing her made me realize how important it is for journalists to know how to read the room, in order to establish trust and get the most honest information that they can get. I also did a lot of research into veterans and PTSD. I did a show a few years ago, called Dimension 404, where I played an Army psychologist, and I interviewed four or five different Army psychologists for that. I had hours-long conversations with them about the things that they went through and that their patients went through, which was important for having that human understanding of what motivates her journalistic drive. It’s not just to get the scoop. It’s to get the scoop because the scoop matters to how we tell the stories of our lives.

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Image via Amazon Studios

There’s such an interesting dynamic that forms between your character, Katie Buranek, and James Reece, because neither one of them really knows what to make of the other. How did you approach forming that partnership with Chris Pratt? What was it like to find that connection and to play within an evolving and ever-changing dynamic?

WU: That was really fun, actually. So often, we get characters that are static tropes, that are the good guy and bad guy, and that are clear cut. One of the fun things, not just about this character and their relationship, but also about the series, is that there are a lot of twists and turns and surprises. One thing that kept me on my toes with Chris’ character is that Katie, my character, never has her finger on exactly whether or not to trust him, and whether or not he’s a reliable narrator, but she’s always in it to keep discovering. The fact that she’s never quite sure lends to a danger that’s exciting. It’s actually a bit of an addiction for her. That’s why she likes gambling, and stuff like that. That was definitely built into the story. And working with Chris, it was so great to see him play this role, and then, when we were off camera, he was such a warm, lovely human. When someone’s so lovely, it opens the gates of trust to make the acting intuitive and easy.

You mentioned doing a musical with Javier Bardem, which is called Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile. What made you want to be part of a story about a singing crocodile? Could you ever have imagined yourself doing a project like that?

WU: I’ve been begging my agents to do a musical for forever. I grew up doing musical theater and children’s theater. I love it. Like I said, I aways wanna just do something that’s different from the thing before. I did The Terminal List, which was this aggressive, dark, action-y guy show because it was very different than playing a stripper in Hustlers, which was different than the rom-com of Crazy Rich Asians, which was different from me playing a tiger mom in Fresh Off the Boat. The goal is not to just get the coolest, flashiest thing. The goal is to get something that’s the most exciting challenge to me, as an actor. That was going from The Terminal List to Lyle, Crocodile. That’s friggin’ awesome. It was just so fun, and I loved working with Javier. It’s really a darling of a movie. I think I might have manifested it because I wanted to do a musical, and I loved Paddington a lot. Paddington 2 is one of my favorite movies. Babe is one of my favorite movies. I had kid over the pandemic, so I wanted to make a movie that my kid could watch.

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Image via Amazon Studios

What did writing a memoir teach you about yourself, that you weren’t expecting?

WU: It was actually really healing and really heartening for me. Social media, in the scheme of media in general, is relatively new. I feel that a lot of journalism has been geared towards reducing stories down to the most clickbait-able, rather than expanding stories, or the thing that causes the most engagement, even if it means writing a misleading headline, in order to direct someone to an article that’s actually more complex. We’re in this very fast clickbait zone, and writing a book is the exact opposite of clickbait. Instead of being reductive of the human experience, it’s expansive. The reason I even got into acting is because I really value the human experience and what it means to be human. It’s so much more complex and layered and beautiful and tender than a 15-second video will allow it to be.

Writing my memoir was really a way of just having an opportunity to expand on and to explore my own humanity and how it’s evolved, as I’ve gone through the public eye, to explore the parts of my past that may have led me here, and to have a new appreciation and gratitude for them. I don’t make myself out to be some shining beacon. With so many actor’s memoirs, they’re like, “Who me?,” or they make it out to be this great hero story. Mine is a very human story of having conflicts with your sisters growing up, or what it’s like as a child of divorce, or going through assault, or having a crisis of confidence when you’re in middle school. It’s all these little small stories that we often try to brush over when we’re trying to act as if we perfect. I think it’s valuable to look at the other side of things because it gives us all permission to make mistakes, and then to learn from them and become better people.

The Terminal List is available to stream on Prime Video.