“Lights Out” star, showrunner dish on remaining episodes, Season 2

UPDATE: FX announced on March 24 that it will not go forth with a Season 2 of Lights Out, making its April 5 episode its season, and presumably series finale.

By Stacey Harrison

The decision is still out on whether FX’s hard-hitting boxing drama Lights Out will live to see a Round 2 next season, but the good news is there are still three episodes left in ex-champ Patrick “Lights” Leary’s quest to regain his title. Tonight’s episode, “Rainmaker,” gives Lights a scary glimpse at his possible future with guest-star David Morse playing one of Lights’ old opponents, a broken-down, punch-drunk brawler who has fallen on hard times.

Writer/executive producer Warren Leight and star Holt McCallany sat down with reporters recently to answer questions about the upcoming episodes, some possible story lines for Season 2, and what real boxers think of the show:

McCallany, on David Morse’s portrayal of Jerry “Rainmaker” Rains: “If you hang around boxing gyms, unfortunately, it doesn’t take long before you meet guys that have taken too many punches and are in that kind of condition. What David was able to capture so beautifully was that there’s very often this sort of sweetness about them.  This kind of child-like … gentleness, almost an innocence about them and it’s really heartbreaking. So I think for ‘Lights’ Leary, there are a combination of emotions at play. First of all, this is a guy that I fought. This is a guy that I admired. Larry Holmes has spoken very candidly over the years about how difficult it was for him to punish Muhammad Ali in the way that he did when they fought because Ali had been somebody that he looked up to and somebody that he really admired. I decided that that’s how I felt about the ‘Rainmaker.’ You catch a guy at the end of his career who maybe stayed in the game a little longer than he should of and he doesn’t move as quickly as he used to and he becomes easy to hit. Jerry got hit a lot and now he’s in this condition that he’s in and like so many fighters, he’s broke and essentially abandoned. Boxing is not a sport where you get a pension when you retire at the end of your career. So I have all of these things — I suppose, on a certain level I feel a measure of culpability. I feel a tremendous amount of empathy and I also feel a great deal of apprehension because I don’t want to end up like him.”

Leight, on the moral compromises “Lights” Leary must make to keep his life on track: “I think that ‘Lights’ is a hero as opposed to an antihero. I like that it can be gray.  … I think he has a big heart, it’s generally in the right place, but he’s in a terrible bind. Early on in the season and again in this episode you see him do something that you know — I think one way that you know a guy is a decent guy is there’s regret for his action, right? I think we’ll get a sense for his regret. If you stick with the series to the finale there’s a beat where you understand he is aware of the compromises and the tradeoffs he made to get to the finale, to get to the Death Row rematch. I think he’s a good guy in a terrible situation who has a fighter’s way out when he needs to and he can think strategically under stress.  … He throws a punch, he knows it’ll get him to the next round but he’s not proud of it. We definitely wanted, with the David Morse character, a sense that ‘Lights’ is also aware this is one possible future for him, a ghost of Christmas future.”

Leight, on routes for a possible Season 2: “I think it’s like, what the hell comes next for this guy? I don’t want to say too much because if people haven’t seen the finale, but what happens to a guy — even though he’s entered the boxing world, one of the realities of it for a guy like this is a $10 million purse by the time Barry Word takes half of it. By the time the IRS takes a large swig of it. It’s not like he’s set. It’s not like — $10 million an average boxer takes home less than the average — the take home is probably something like, it can be less than 15%. Some of the guys we’ve talked to talked about $100,000 purses and they took home $7,000. So, he’s not out of the hole he’s in completely. He’s also aware that he’s made a couple of deals with devils in order to get to where he gets at the end of the season and I don’t think he brought a long enough spoon, if you remember those old quotes. I think he’s in deep with some bad guys as the season ends. It’s always interesting to see what happens to the rest of your family when your status changes. What happens to [his brother] Johnny? What happens to the gym? We’ve also talked a little bit about the possibility of introducing MMA into Season 2, and that’s an interesting place for the show to go.”

McCallany, on the feedback he’s gotten from real-life boxers: “That was one of the most gratifying things to me about this whole experience was that the real fighters have really embraced the show. We had a lot of them over the course of the season, Paulie Malignaggi and Mark Breland and John Duddy and Peter Manfredo. We did some work for our promotional campaign with Larry Holmes and with Freddy Roach and obviously our technical adviser is Teddy Atlas. So we had a lot of real guys and they really like the show a lot. When we had our premiere, we had Wladimir Klitschko and Lennox Lewis and Joe Frazier and Larry Holmes and Gerry Cooney and Mickey Ward. Afterwards, I was talking to some of the guys and Lennox Lewis said very, very complimentary things about the show. Larry Holmes was cracking up and he said, ‘Man, that’s what happens to me when I try to make love to my wife something that bugs me every time, man, every time.’ They just loved it. Wladimir Klitschko was very, very complimentary and they all — you know what they say to you? They say, ‘Listen, if you need me, I’d love to come on. If there’s anything I could do …’ Lennox Lewis wants to come on. Sugar Ray Leonard wants to come on. Gerry Cooney brings it up to me every time I see him. So if that’s any indication of what they think of the show — they not only love the show, they’d love to come work with us and do anything with us.”

Leight on how The Fighter affected awareness for Lights Out: “I would hesitate to say it drove people to us. It seems like it’s the movie and the TV show have existed in parallel universes. I remember being very anxious when I saw the promo for the movie in the early fall and I thought, ‘Well, is this show going to somehow get confused with that or are people going to feel like that satiates their appetite and not realize this show is about more than just boxing?’ … So there’s a sense that maybe something’s going to pop because of this and there was a couple of boxing documentaries, but I don’t think we benefited from that movie coming out when it did. I think it didn’t make people want to see our show more. Maybe it compartmentalized an audience or satiated some people, but certainly it didn’t give us a bump that we all might have hoped for.”

(McCallany): “I think Warren’s definitely right. Those guys are friends of mine. I’ve known David O. Russell and Mark Wahlberg for a long time. I did a movie called Three Kings with them back in the ’90s. I know Mickey Ward really well because we’re on the same charity together and we sit next to each other every year at the big annual dinner and I followed his career and stuff. I was really rooting for them. I like those guys very much and I’m happy for their success, but I will confess to you that there were several occasions particularly in the early stages, when the show was first coming up, where people would come up to me in restaurants or airports and stuff and they would say, ‘Hey, you’re that guy from The Fighter.’ And I’d say, ‘No, I’m Lights Out.’ They’d say, ‘What? No, you’re from the boxing movie.’ I say, ‘No, well I’m from the boxing television show.’ They’d be like, ‘The television show?’ ‘Yes, my show is Lights Out. It’s on FX every Tuesday night at 10.’ So I think that there was some confusion. I mean obviously, there’s a sophisticated portion of the audience that does understand, but I think that there was a little bit of that going on.”

Photo: Credit: Barbara Nitke / FX