Colter Shaw will reunite with a familiar face on Sunday, Oct. 27, of Tracker, when Sofia Pernas reprises her Season 1 role as bounty hunter Billie Matalon.
While CBS has only revealed that Billie needs Colter’s help tracking down a missing high school athlete, real-life married Pernas and Justin Hartley tell TVLine that her latest appearance packs an emotional punch and will further explain why these dueling bounty hunters have a connection beyond their specific professions.
“We get to see a little bit of her backstory,” Pernas says. “I feel like we were sharing bread in 106, and she’s comfortable in 203″—comfortable sharing more about herself with Colter, who hasn’t necessarily been someone she’d trust with sensitive information before. “That icebreaker moment [on the phone in Season 1, Episode 6] gave her a certain comfort level to be able to say, ‘I need help,’ and she asked him for help in the third episode.”
“Of course, he was skeptical,” Hartley points out, because when the audience first met Billie, we learned that she had kidnapped him in a joint mission and taken the bounty for herself. But this time, Billie’s plea was “reasonable.” Along the way, “you learn a lot about her, about her childhood, and it gets pretty intense. It’s a very sad story, but it’s also a story of triumph and perseverance.”
Pernas adds: “You understand why she is who she is, in many ways, and that comes from her mother.” And who better to understand deep family trauma than Colter Shaw?
“They have a great scene where she really opens up to him in a way that you…” Hartley pauses, then turns to Pernas: “The way you deliver that is great. Your performance shows that you’ve never shared [this information] with anyone, ever.” And we know that’s exactly how Pernas chose to present it. “In my mind, she’s buried this so deep, and she makes a living off of this wall that she’s built,” Pernas explains. “I don’t think this is something she’d just tell someone over coffee, so I wanted it to be deeper than that.”
