Jon Huertas On Reuniting With This Is Us Co-Star Justin Hartley For Tracker
The latest installment of CBS’ new crime drama, Tracker, features a heartfelt reunion both on and off screen. Season 1, episode 9 sees Colter team up with a local detective to find a young woman who disappeared after a seemingly supernatural incident. Although she is presumed dead by law enforcement, her widowed father remains confident that Lana is alive and being held against her will.
Behind the scenes of “Aurora,” Justin Hartley collaborates with This Is Us co-star, Jon Huertas, who serves as the director. Huertas expresses his excitement to return to the director’s chair and play off of the shorthand he developed with both Hartley and executive producer, Ken Olin. Filming the episode presented several challenges, from tight-spaced action sequences to unexpected snow, but Huertas believes the result was well worth the effort.
Jon Huertas chats with Screen Rant about reuniting with Justin Hartley, unpacking Colter’s backstory, and his thoughts on Aurora’s supernatural storyline.
Huertas Was Approached To Direct Tracker While Filming This Is Us
Screen Rant: You reunited with Justin Hartley and Ken Olin for this episode of Tracker. How did the opportunity present itself?
Jon Huertas: Before This Is Us ended, when Justin and Ken were putting the show together, they asked me if I would ever want to come and direct on the show if it gets picked up, and I said, “Absolutely.” I’m a huge fan of both of those guys. I know that Ken is a fan of my work as a director, which makes me feel good. [Laughs] So if he’s gonna hire me, it’s gonna make me feel even better. So that’s how it came about. They asked me at the end of This Is Us if I’d be interested if the show got up on its feet, and it did. It stumbled through some strike and some other things and I finally got to go up to Vancouver and jump into the director’s chair again.
How did your working relationship with Justin aid you as a director on this project?
Jon Huertas: We have a shorthand, because we know each other so well. I think the projects I want to work on are projects where I’ve actually, hopefully, worked with someone on the show, whether it’s behind the camera or in front of the camera. Having that rapport with people makes the job easier. Working with Justin is easy, because he’s such a talented guy. He guest starred on Castle many years ago, and I remember how natural and how great he was. I was like, “Who is this guy?” I had never seen him or heard of him before.
Years later, I remember watching the pilot of This Is Us, and I was like, “Okay, so that character, Kevin, and the way he snapped when it came to the pilot…” His work was so wonderful. He’s been one of my favorite actors on that show, and in general, for so long. It makes my job as a director easy when I’m working with him. It’s a joy to be able to spot in the director’s chair when you have a great producing director like Ken and a great actor like Justin.
I’m curious how being a seasoned actor like yourself also helps you behind the scenes.
Jon Huertas: I think it gives me a shorthand as far as how actors and directors speak to one another. I think that the best directors are ones that, even if they’ve never been in front of the camera or worked onstage, they’ve at least taken some acting classes just so they can understand how to talk to an actor to pull performance from them and get the emotional emotional beat that they’re looking for in the scene. If you can talk to an actor in their language, that helps make it easy. That strength of being an actor is something that I bring to directing. But, also, as a television director, you’ve got to stand up in front of a lot of people sometimes and tell them, “This is what we’re doing.”
Having had to do that for so many years and throw dialogue out there in front of the entire two-hundred-person crew—I’m comfortable. I’m comfortable enough to ask for what I need from the crew and ask for what I want. I’m also fine with the word “no,” because as an actor, you hear that a lot. You have to get used to people telling you no. Like, “No, you’re not right for this part.” So if I asked for the world as a director, and they tell me no, it’s no skin off my back. The water beads up and rolls off my back.
If they say no, I figure out another way to do it. As an actor, when you are making choices in a scene, there are these obstacles that are usually presented to you, either in the script or from your co-star’s performance, and you have to overcome those obstacles. So having to overcome obstacles is something that I’ve had to do as an actor, and now as the director, you have to do that. It’s my favorite part of directing. Figuring out how to overcome obstacles that are thrown in your path.
Colter’s Backstory Lends Itself To The Tracker Case
Tracker is still in its first season, but of the episodes that have aired so far, what excited you most about the storyline for Aurora?
Jon Huertas: I love the storyline because it felt like a classic thriller movie that I grew up loving. I think one of the movies that it reminded me of was Prisoners with Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. I love that movie. It’s one of my favorites, and this episode kind of lent itself to have that vibe and feeling. When I read it, I thought it was cool that Colter gets to have a true partner in this, an investigative partner, when teaming up with the local detective. I just thought that was something I hadn’t seen on Tracker.
At the end, she says, “Hey, there’s a place for you here at the department.” That was a natural thing for him to fall in lockstep with someone and solve this crime together. I liked that about the script a lot. One of my favorite things, as a director, and in life, is collaborating with people and with artists. I can only imagine that really good investigators love collaborating with other really good investigators. And so to get that feeling between those two characters and have that chemistry between those two characters was important.
What about Colter’s backstory? What interests you most about Justin’s character, and what did you work with him to bring out for this episode specifically?
Jon Huertas: There was some stuff I wanted to put in there that we weren’t able to. I can’t wait to see more of Colter’s backstory unfold because there’s so much there to unpack. His backstory lent itself to this case that he’s working. He didn’t have the family unit that was normal—growing up in the woods and being this survivalist. I think the idea of a normal family is something that he wished he had. When he sees a father—it’s destroyed him, losing his daughter. I know it’s about Colter being a rewardist and getting this reward money, but I feel like every episode is about that human story.
I think him always wanting a normal human upbringing in life and knowing that he’s a product of this way that he grew up, which gives him all of his superpowers and all of his strengths, he still longs for real connection with people. I think that’s what he ends up doing every time he takes on a case. He has this connection with someone. He finds it because it’s something he’s always longed for. That’s what his past opens him up to. So when this father is like, “I know it’s her. I need you. I need you to help me,” he has to. Every episode, it’s more than just the money. It’s about the personal angle and the personal story for each one of these cases he takes on.
We get a little taste of the supernatural. Have you worked in that genre before? Were you excited to touch on it here?
Jon Huertas: I’ve worked in the supernatural as an actor. I did a movie years ago called The Objective with one of the directors of The Blair Witch Project. We have elements of found footage in this episode, so I’ve done it before. I’m a big skeptic. I don’t believe in the supernatural, personally. What I liked is that we were able to play with the audience. Some people might believe in the Harkwood Witch, and some might not, and there’s the fact that kids are film students. Are they just making all this up? Are they trying to do their own Blair Witch Project?
I thought it was really cool and grounded it enough so people who are more skeptic like me can invest in that and go, “Yeah, none of this is real.” But then there’s enough of a question presented to where people who do lean into the supernatural can go, “I think this part was real. Maybe he really did get scratched by some crazy, invisible witch.” I liked that we were able to tug at both ends of the string. The people who are skeptical and the people who are maybe a little bit more of believers in the supernatural.
It was fun. I think my personal experience didn’t really affect how I was going to tell this story because, being such a skeptic, and I hate saying that, but I don’t believe in ghosts or witches. I believe in Wiccan. I think [it was about] just staying really true to the script. There was such a great writer that we had on this episode. I think letting the script guide us through that is what I wanted to do.
The Opening Scene Of Tracker Episode 9 Was A “Happy Accident”
There are a lot of heavy scenes in “Aurora,” but is there one in particular that you found challenging to get the right take for?
Jon Huertas: The most challenging part of the episode was the action stuff in the basement because it was such a small space. We wanted to keep an air of mystery and suspense and danger, and because it’s such a small space, it was a little tough to make sure that we’re doing that and making it feel like Colter is lost in this labyrinth space. That was pretty challenging. And then there were some logistical challenges that we dealt with, which ended up being a happy accident. For our opening scene, I checked the weather before I left my hotel, and it was going to be no precipitation. It was going to be forty degrees. I was like, “I’ll put a couple of layers on, but not too deep.”
The location was like forty minutes away. I’m studying my script, so thirty minutes into the drive, I hadn’t looked out the window yet. When I finally looked out the window, there are three inches of snow on the ground. We didn’t plan for this. So it ended up being very, very cold. I had a very difficult shot with a drone that I was doing with the bridge. We had a lot of people out there, and our background artists and costume department didn’t realize there was going to be snow. Everybody was freezing, we had to take a break.
It was difficult to get the drone to hit the right flight path. It was a lot of logistics that were just in jeopardy when it comes to how we put it together. And now, that’s one of my favorite moments. The opening shot is one of my favorite moments in the whole episode. I just feel like it all plays out and cuts together so well. Because it’s three years prior to the rest of our story, the snow ended up being a great piece of production value. It feels cold, dismal, and sad as this drone is flying in. And that’s exactly what we wanted for him to find this girl’s body. It ended up being perfect.
I was excited to see you directed “Double Trouble” for The Rookie. That episode was in true crime format, and Eric Winter and Melissa O’Neil played characters who were drastically different from Tim and Lucy. Could you share some insight into how you navigated that?
Jon Huertas: That was a really fun episode. The Rookie had done a couple of other true crime episodes before that. We got the script kind of late, but the script was so different from the other episodes they had shot that were true crime. In the script, it was just surveillance cameras and body cam. I had pitched to Alexi Hawley, the showrunner, “Now that this documentary filmmaker, you, has become successful, I think he’s upgraded, and now has a Cops-style film crew.” So it allowed us to get a little closer and deeper into the action. And also, it was Alexi Hawley’s on-camera debut as an actor. In the original script, he wasn’t on camera, he was off camera.
I was like, “I think we should capture you on camera. That would be fun.” I had so much fun doing that episode, because you allow these characters to break this fourth wall and speak directly to the audience, and that’s rare in a procedural television show. The actors had so much fun in these roles, which allowed me to have a lot of fun. I’ve known Eric Winter for a long time, and he has so much fun playing that [Dim] character. It’s so funny. So does Melissa O’Neil. I think that they really love stepping out of Tim and Lucy to be these crazy wild characters. I had a great time doing that episode, and really allowing actors to have fun, and allowing Alexi to have fun in front of the camera.
About Tracker
TRACKER stars Justin Hartley as Colter Shaw, a lone-wolf survivalist who roams the country as a reward seeker, using his expert tracking skills to help private citizens and law enforcement solve all manner of mysteries while contending with his own fractured family. The series is based on the bestselling novel The Never Game by Jeffery Deaver.
