NEED TO KNOW
The Terminal List creator Jack Carr is mid-sentence when he gets video bombed by his star, Chris Pratt, who is briefly — playfully — disrupting the interview.
Pratt, 46, is supposed to be doing his own interviews elsewhere but can’t resist bursting into the chat with Carr and co-executive producer Jared Shaw.
He semi-apologizes, even though it’s evident he lacks true remorse. But then the hijinks are nothing new with this band of brothers.
Pratt goes on to make a second impromptu pop-in during the interview, enjoying the time with former Navy SEALs Carr and Shaw as they promote their latest project, a Terminal List prequel called Dark Wolf that is streaming new episodes each week on Prime Video.
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Co-created by The New York Times bestselling author Carr and season 1 creator and showrunner David DiGilio, Dark Wolf follows Ben Edwards (Taylor Kitsch) on his journey from the SEALs to the clandestine side of CIA special operations.
Pratt reprises his role as James Reece while Shaw again plays Ernest “Boozer” Vickers. Carr says Shaw is “extremely humble, maybe to a fault sometimes. We would not be sitting here were it not for Jared Shaw.”
In fact, the entire project has been built through the connections made between Carr, Shaw and Pratt and their shared ties to the SEALs.
Most of the people in front and behind the camera on Dark Wolf are military veterans and, they say, they all strive to bring an authenticity to a series that also needs to entertain.
Carr says he knew early on that he wanted to write thrillers but he also wanted to serve his country through Navy special forces.
He joined the Navy in 1996 and retired in 2016. His service included becoming a sniper, and he served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also read voraciously and became a student of warfare.
“As a child of the ’80s, I just pictured those thrillers being turned into TV shows and movies at some point,” Carr says. “And I just never grew out of that.”
“As I started writing, I could really bring those feelings and emotions behind certain events to the pages of a thriller,” he says. “But even before I started writing, Jared Shaw, Navy SEAL extraordinaire, decides to leave the military.”
Shaw served in the SEALs from 2002 until 2013 and did four combat deployments, including in Fallujah — site of some of Iraq’s fiercest fighting — as a sniper and a breacher.
He says it’s strange how people are conditioned by watching movies, video games and TV shows to forget about the real-life consequences of going into battle.
“I remember very clearly that moment in my life. Rounds were flying and I always thought, there’s going to be this moment and it’s going to be cool,” Shaw says of when he realized he was living real life and it was not like what he’d seen onscreen. “It was very sobering. A mind-clearing moment.”
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Shaw says he hit a little more than 10 years of service and decided it was time to move on to the next chapter in his life. The move for any SEAL to not re-enlist is not a popular one, and he admits he didn’t exactly know what that next chapter might be.
“We have this thing in SEAL training about never quitting, so some people thought if you got out, it was kind of a black mark,” Carr says. “But he [Shaw] was a good guy in the SEAL team and I wanted to help with his transition out. That’s what we owe these guys.”
Shaw says he was surprised when he heard Carr — then still an officer — calling out his name as he walked from one building to the next on his Coronado, Calif., base in 2013.
“Usually when somebody calls ‘Hey Shaw!’ it’s not a good thing when you are used to being in trouble a few times in the military,” he says.
But Carr told him “I hear you are getting out of the military” and asked Shaw about his plans and Shaw responded that he was thinking of going back to his home state of Texas and opening a shooting school.
The next thing Shaw knows, Carr is connecting him with buddies who already ran such a school.
“He took me under his wing when he didn’t really know me, when I didn’t have anybody in my chain of command helping me, connecting me to people in the outside world,” Shaw says.
And that could have been the end of the story if not for certain twists of fate still to come.
While Shaw was still a SEAL, Pratt shadowed him in preparation for his role as SEAL Team Six member Justin Lenihan in 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
The two became buddies and kept in touch after Shaw moved to Texas.
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Shaw worked as a stuntman, including on a few of Pratt’s movies including Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Jurassic World. Then Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Houston in August 2017.
Shaw has already told the story of what happened next.
“Hurricane Harvey hit my condo like a target. I called up Pratt — ‘Hey buddy, so how about that offer?’ Shaw said on a podcast in 2024, recalling how he grabbed his dog and jumped in his Toyota pick-up to head to Los Angeles and start his Hollywood life full time.
Meanwhile, Carr had been spending his post-military life writing a book, which was about to be published in November 2017. A mutual friend put the manuscript in Shaw’s hands, something he was not quite excited about at first.
“My first thought was, ‘Oh, another SEAL wrote a book,’ but then I remember Jack and this time in my life when I needed help and he was a great dude,” Shaw says. “So it went from there.”
He and Carr hadn’t spoken in years but immediately clicked over Carr’s book, which stayed true to their military experiences.
“II had no connections in Hollywood while I’m writing this book,” says Carr, laughing. “It was funny how I learned there was a connection to Chris Pratt when [Jared] asked if he could show it to Chris and I thought, ‘That is very convenient for me.’ ”
Indeed, Carr says, he always envisioned Pratt playing his main character.
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Pratt quickly optioned the book in the first week in Januaruy 2018. (Shaw took a photo of the engrossed actor reading The Terminal List on a plane.)
Season 1 premiered in 2022 and has been renewed for another season on Prime Video. The team is working on a third installation of the series based on Carr’s True Believer, the next book in the series.
“I think the camaraderie we have within our team is the closest thing to the military I’ve found since getting out,” Shaw says. “[Carr] taking care of the our team, the way [he] took care of me in 2013, is one of the most special things. It’s a blessing.”
New episodes of The Terminal List: Dark Wolf stream Wednesdays on Prime Video.
