Michelle Dockery talks about the new season of TNT's locally filmed "Good Behavior" and spills what's ahead for Letty.

Michelle Dockery’s first impression of Wilmington came courtesy of a simple Google search.

More than two years ago, before her seductive TNT drama series “Good Behavior” shot its pilot episode in Wilmington, she got the call that the show would shoot in the Port City.

The English actress had just wrapped six seasons of playing Lady Mary Crawley in “Downton Abbey,” for which she was nominated for three consecutive Emmys, and immediately began preparing to jump into the polar opposite role of Letty Raines, a drug- and alcohol-addicted Southern con woman and thief.

But first, she had to find out exactly where she was being sent to film.

“I didn’t really know what to expect,” Dockery said over the phone from London. “I just typed it into Google and the first things I saw was the beach and the boardwalk.”

Two years later, Dockery said she holds a fondness for Wilmington, where she has lived while filming two seasons of “Good Behavior.”

“I love it there,” she said. “It is a secret, really. When I tell people I’ve been working in Wilmington, they just have no idea. I think it is a very special part of the world.”

Season two of the drama series premieres 10 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 15, the culmination of more than six months of shooting earlier this year throughout the region.

When the show finished its first season, Letty had found some semblance of a happy ending, riding over the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge and into a new life with her hitman boyfriend, Javier (Juan Diego Botto), and son, Jacob (Nyles Julian Steele), of whom she had just regained custody. But with FBI Agent Lashever (new Emmy winner Ann Dowd) still sniffing around, Dockery said a worry-free life won’t be something Letty can easily steal.

“They are embarking on this normal life with Jacob, but very quickly they start to fail at it,” she said. “This season, it’s about everything sort of closing in on them, which makes it really exciting. You are left with a cliffhanger every episode.”

The season premiere finds them hiding out under new names on the Georgia coast (in reality, it’s Wrightsville Beach), as Letty and Javier prove old habits die hard and Jacob struggles to understand the complexities and limitations of living a fake life.

Two seasons in, Letty’s restless energy continues to be a welcome challenge for Dockery, who said she wrestles with the con woman’s seemingly endless array of skills and shifting motivations. It’s that push and pull between Letty and herself, and Letty and Javier, that Dockery said drives the show.

“I think that’s what great about the show,” she said. “Nothing is too obvious or literal. It lives on this sort of knife edge, which is essentially the way Letty and Javier live.”

Last season, “Good Behavior” and Wilmington proved to be a perfect pair, with the show using simplistic, full-of-character locations for Letty and Javier’s journey around the South. That continues into season two, something Dockery believes is essential to the fabric of the show.

“Shows that have the ‘Ocean’s 11’ core to it, with a thief and a hitman, normally they are on a huge scale in casinos and hotels,” she said. “But our show takes place in these tiny diners and motel rooms. It’s what makes us unique.”

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Wilmington and the surrounding region will be very visible in the new season as characters visit recognizable bars (Blue Post, Reggie’s and Captain Bill’s), local schools (Winter Park and Forest Hills elementary schools), diners (Parchies, White Front Breakfast House and Ezzell’s), and hotels and motels (Red Carpet Inn and Carolinian Inn).

With the next leg of Letty’s journey about to unfold, Dockery said she still finds herself enthralled in her alter ego, something she said only deepens the more time she spends with her.

“She is an extraordinary character and a beautifully complex woman,” she said. “I love all the parts of her, the good and the bad.”

If Letty is true to form, there will be plenty of both in season two.

Reporter Hunter Ingram can be reached at 910-343-2327 or Hunter.Ingram@StarNewsOnline.com. Hunter is a member of the Television Critics Association.

