Warning: The following interview contains spoilers for episode 1 of The Last Frontier.
Occasionally, all it takes is an excellent beard to play a convincing felon. Sam Hargrave is a talented director best known for helming the Netflix movie Extraction and its sequel, Extraction 2. The former stuntman-turned-filmmaker also has a signature feature: a grizzly beard. When The Last Frontier co-creator Jon Bokenkamp struggled to find an actor to play one of the convicts, he shifted his attention to the man behind the camera, Hargrave.
“We all revere the beard,” Bonkenkamp told Digital Trends about casting Hargrave for the first episode. Hargrave, a director and executive producer on The Last Frontier, portrayed one of the key convicts who escaped the initial plane crash. There are two scenes in the first episode, including a riveting “oner” after the crash, that have Hargrave’s action footprints all over them.
In The Last Frontier, Jason Clarke plays Frank Remnick, a U.S. Marshal who works in a quiet and small Alaskan town. Remnick is thrust into a life-or-death situation after a prison transport plane crashes in the wilderness. Many of these aggressive inmates escape and head to the woods toward freedom, with the town in their sights. The more Remick investigates the crash, the more he learns about the nefarious actions of the CIA, who will do anything to catch the prisoner known as Havlock.
Ahead, Bonkenkamp explains how The Last Frontier originally started as a New York City show and why he eventually pivoted to Alaska. Plus, Bonkenkamp discusses how the addition of Hargrave led to the evolution of the show’s action scenes.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Digital Trends: You originally envisioned the show set in New York City, but over time, it went to Alaska. As a creator, is it hard for you to let go of ideas and allow other ones to take over? How far along in the process were you when you said goodbye to one thing to open the door for something else?
Jon Bokenkamp: That’s a great question. It’s a balance. One of the hardest parts of the job for me is to not only fall in love with an idea and have it be really personal and something you believe in, and then be able to acknowledge, OK, maybe that’s not what we should do. Maybe we should pivot and try to embrace something else.
You find that all the way through filming, when you’re talking to the actors, they have different ideas. When you’re talking to the directors, that evolution is this creative soup where it’s collaborative. Sometimes, it’s hard. Sometimes, I feel like I have to dig in, but I find that usually the best work comes when I just open up and let people do what they do best, you know?
Was it hard to say goodbye to New York City on this one?
No, and here’s why. The idea would be crazy if it had been set in New York City. I’m a rural guy. I live in Nebraska in a small town, and I think I understand that better. I think the older I get, I’m probably writing from my point of view. By listening to that, I think we found a more interesting story where these inmates are so varied and diverse in their problems.
It’s such a stark juxtaposition to this small-town U.S. Marshal. He’s probably used to transporting an inmate to a court case or taking somebody to a dental appointment. He’s not used to a plane falling out of the sky in his backyard. That creates a really fun, heightened world to live in. I thought that was more fun.
You talked about wanting to make a show like a ‘90s blockbuster, which is how I believed you described it. Then you get Sam [Hargrave] as a director and an EP. I’m sure you had ideas for action scenes, but when you got Sam on board and he could do something like a great oner and continuous shot, did your ideas evolve? Were you like, “All right, we have Sam; we can do this now? Let’s change up our style.”
I think for me it’s mostly about just trying to make sure we’re keeping the same tone. That’s my job to guard that and protect that. It’s a very unusual tone, the show. It’s action forward, but it’s also a little fun, and it’s a little weird. When we have a scene that’s maybe half a page or a page of action, Sam comes in, and he’s like, “I think this is a three-and-a-half-minute oner that’s going to be insane and crazy.”
We find the middle ground on that, but he’s got to do his thing. When you turn to creative people like him, his brother Daniel is instrumental in what we did; I just kind of stand back and watch him do his thing and know it’s going to be great. Yeah, getting out of the way is part of my job there.
Let the chef cook.
Exactly.
Did it take some convincing for him [Sam] to act in the show? Whose idea was it to make him a prisoner?
Look, Sam has such a specific look with his beard. We all revere the beard, so how can we not feature it? We were looking for somebody that was distinctive. We needed something that would stand out.
We’re talking about casting and trying to come up with people. We’re like [points to his right] the guy right here in the room might be pretty good. He was totally game for it. He was great.
The Last Frontier will premiere globally on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes on Friday, October 10, followed by a new episode every Friday through December 5, 2025.
