Bravo is dealt a heartbreaking, gut-wrenching (we hope you weren’t eating during the opening!) blow in the SEAL Team Season 6 premiere.
While everyone does survive the ambush that left off Season 5, Clay’s (Max Thieriot) leg is, to put it mildly, a mess. With the leg infected, the doctors — the team is transported once again to Germany, and Sonny (AJ Buckley) stays after Clay insists everyone else go home — have no choice but to amputate to save his life.
Showrunner Spencer Hudnut discusses Clay’s future as well as how much we’ll see Thieriot this season, how it affects Bravo, and more.
That opening was insane and so hard to watch with Clay’s leg.
Spencer Hudnut: I think it’s the most intense footage we’ve ever shot, and yeah, the stuff with his leg is just so painful, so hard to keep your eyes on. But it’s not something we could have done on network television. That’s really us taking full advantage of our new home on Paramount+.
It also seemed like Clay losing his leg was the only way things could go at that point. Was that a result of Max on Fire Country? Or had it been something you were thinking about doing before, even if not necessarily with Clay?
For a few years now, I’ve always wanted to tell that story of an operator having that level of injury. The timing never quite felt right. So coming into Season 6, I will say [with] Max’s situation, it feels like the best way forward. Max and I talked about it, even starting last season before any of this Fire Country stuff really came about.
So he was on board with it for a long time. It just feels like his character got to a place, with a wife and a young child, that the stakes are so high. He tells Jason [David Boreanaz] at the end of Season 5, he’s gonna walk away and go to Green Team. Well, now that choice is forced on him. How he deals with that is really the struggle, the loss of identity is something that we’ve always wanted to examine. It feels like the best way to move forward with [Max] and put him in a situation that’s a little bit removed from the team.
How much will we see him this season? Every episode?
Yeah, I think we did a really good job and Max played a huge part in making it clear to everyone that he wanted to be as involved in this season as he could be, so he is heavily involved. It’s clear at the end of this episode that he’s not gonna be with Bravo team moving forward, but his journey dealing with this injury is a huge part of the season.
You mentioned the loss of identity. What else can you say about how he’s handling it, physically and mentally?
Obviously, it’s a traumatic event for him, but Clay is never lacking in self-confidence. Clay has overcome every obstacle ever put in front of him. Clay was the leader in Green Team. He’s one of the best operators in command despite being one of the youngest. At first, like any problem, he’s confident that he can overcome it. But as time progresses and he really starts to understand how much he’s been impacted by the injury, it starts to seep into every part of his life and that struggle for him is really part of his journey this season.
What can you say about seeing him working with Bravo in the future?
One of the things that makes this storyline appealing is that there have been SEALs who have had a similar injury to what happened to Clay that have made it back to operating. We didn’t want to do anything that took that off the table down the road.
We didn’t want to do anything that’s completely unbelievable, but the fact that there are operators who made it back from an injury like this gave us hope that we’ll see if Clay and his Bravo teammates can reunite somewhere at another time.
How will this affect his and Stella’s relationship? Alona [Tal] was so good in this premiere.
Yeah, Alona is amazing. She and Max are so great together, even though they’re really not together in this episode. Everything we’ve put them through over the last five-plus seasons, we’re so invested in that relationship. For anyone who’s the spouse of one of our men and women in uniform who deals with a traumatic injury, we really get into that as well.
How do you support someone? A tier one operator who was able to do whatever he wanted in the world and now all of a sudden he has a hard time doing basic things around the house. It’s a really difficult balancing act for any spouse who’s put in that situation and obviously those are going to be challenges for Stella.
How will the rest of Bravo handle what’s happened? They have to learn to operate without him while worrying about him, right?
Absolutely. The brotherhood is so tight. They take care of each other. They rallied around him, got him off the battlefield, but as they continued forward without him, they’re not able to have that control in really making sure that he’s on the right path. Some of the teammates are gonna have their own guilt issues. Jason in the premiere talks about coughsw he, on some levels, puts Clay in the path of this RPG that costs him to lose his leg. Sonny feels a lot of guilt going back to Season 5 about the way he treated Clay. There’s a little bit of survivor’s guilt that we’re definitely gonna explore. It’s gonna hang over these guys the entire season.
