![Jonathan Tropper & Cassie Pappas On ‘Lucky,’ ‘Star Wars: Starfighter’ & The Lost Ronda Rousey ‘Road House’ [Bingeworthy Podcast]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/16105453/Lucky_Photo_010205.jpg.photo_modal_show_home_large_2x.jpg "Jonathan Tropper & Cassie Pappas On ‘Lucky,’ ‘Star Wars: Starfighter’ & The Lost Ronda Rousey ‘Road House’ [Bingeworthy Podcast]")
Apple TV’s “Lucky” joins the platform’s growing collection of prestige shows about attractive, deeply stressed people having the worst week of their lives. “Presumed Innocent,” “Hijack,” “Your Friends & Neighbors”—the streamer has become weirdly good at watching people sprint from one life-altering disaster to the next.
Anya Taylor-Joy’s title character has a slightly more complicated relationship with disaster than most. Raised by a con artist, Lucky became an exceptional one herself before spending years trying to leave that life behind. When a multimillion-dollar job goes wrong, she is forced back into the world she escaped, pursued by law enforcement, criminals, and a family history she has never completely outrun.
Based on Marissa Stapley’s novel, the seven-episode Apple TV limited series stars Taylor-Joy, Timothy Olyphant, Annette Bening, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Drew Starkey, Clifton Collins Jr., and William Fichtner. It is a fast, addictive chase thriller, but co-showrunners Jonathan Tropper and Cassie Pappas were never especially interested in treating Lucky like a game piece being pushed from one elaborate con to another.
For them, the series began with a daughter, her father, and the uncomfortable question of how much of our parents we carry around, whether we want to or not.
“Day one, page one, we were always looking at character first, and we were looking at the father-daughter relationship,” Pappas said during a recent appearance on The Playlist’s Bingeworthy podcast. “You always talk about what kind of baggage we inherited from our parents. Am I going to be an addict because my dad was an addict? That just becomes higher-stakes, life-and-death stuff when your dad is a criminal, he raised you to be one, you never had a say in it, you’re not even sure you want to be one, but you’re actually really good at it.”
Stapley’s novel gave Tropper and Pappas that central father-daughter relationship, along with its themes of redemption and reinvention, but adapting it meant creating a more immediate threat around Lucky. Seven episodes of television needed a different engine than a novel, and Stapley gave them room to rebuild the story accordingly.
“We knew that to make it the kind of taut thriller we wanted it to be, we would have to invent certain plot and character elements and stay away from certain plot points in the book,” Tropper explained. “I had multiple talks with Marissa, who understood that doing seven episodes of television is very different than writing a 350-page novel. We really had her blessing to take the themes she was exploring, primarily the father-daughter relationship, redemption, reinvention, and rediscovery, and use certain cornerstones of the book while inventing other characters.”
The goal was not to reproduce every turn of the novel. It was to put Lucky through a similar emotional journey while making the danger around her “more immediate and more visceral.”
Pappas came into the series after working on Apple’s “Silo,” another adaptation with a complicated central mystery and a character attempting to understand the world built around her. The similarities pretty much end there. “Silo” was designed to unfold over several seasons patiently. “Lucky” had seven episodes to light the fuse and keep moving.
“With ‘Silo,’ we knew when we got greenlit, and they were building those insane sets, that we were doing four seasons of television,” Pappas said. “We could slow-burn and pull a thread through a mystery. With this one, we knew we only had seven episodes. We had seven hours of television to go full throttle and make the most propulsive thing we could. In a way, they were night and day.”
Tropper, meanwhile, was also juggling the second season of “Your Friends & Neighbors.” He had run shows including “Banshee” and “Warrior” largely on his own, but the realities of overseeing two productions made “Lucky” a genuine co-showrunning operation.
“This is a Hello Sunshine show, and it needed a strong female perspective,” Tropper said. “From the beginning, I was thinking I definitely needed a strong female writer doing this with me. What turned it into co-showrunning was the fact that I had another show and couldn’t possibly run two. Cassie was really on the ground in L.A. daily, running the show once we were in production.”
The two collaborated throughout the writing and post-production processes, but Pappas handled the day-to-day production machine while Tropper moved between the two series.
The resulting show understands that con artists are fascinating because of what they see in other people, not simply because they can construct an elaborate scheme. “Lucky” has scams and heists, but Tropper and Pappas were not trying to create a seven-hour puzzle where every watch, elevator, fake mustache, and conveniently placed room-service cart eventually clicks into place.
“We start from the assumption that we’re writing the show for smart people,” Tropper said. “It’s not really fun to write otherwise. But while we’re big fans of movies like ‘Ocean’s Eleven,’ we were not looking to make an intricate, slick con thriller or heist show. This is really a character-driven drama that has the con much more as a psychological underpinning of a childhood, a family dynamic, and an upbringing.”
Taylor-Joy was already attached to “Lucky” as both its star and an executive producer before Tropper and Pappas joined the project. She was not arriving at the end of the development process to perform what had been written. Lucky was already someone she had thought deeply about.
“She had a pretty strong point of view about the character,” Tropper said. “The more we developed it, the more she was able to weigh in and course-correct us based on how she felt. She felt some kind of emotional kinship with this character, and she knew how she was going to convey her.”
One of Tropper’s other projects takes place in a galaxy far, far away. He wrote “Star Wars: Starfighter,” the upcoming Shawn Levy-directed film starring Ryan Gosling, and has now seen enough of the finished work to make the wait until its release considerably more painful for himself.
Tropper remained understandably guarded about the plot, but described the movie as an attempt to recover the open-ended adventure of seeing the original “Star Wars” before decades of mythology accumulated around it.
“The goal from the beginning, when Shawn and I first started talking about it, was to create the feeling in theaters that we had as kids seeing ‘Star Wars’ back in 1977,” he said. “That sense of a swashbuckling adventure into new worlds. For us, that was really important. There are no barriers to entry. You don’t have to have seen other ‘Star Wars’ movies to step into this one.”
Rather than asking audiences to arrive with a working knowledge of several timelines, animated series, and the current political structure of the New Republic, Tropper and Levy wanted to build something around “wish fulfillment and adventure.”
“I think Shawn has done an incredible job,” Tropper added. “I think Gosling’s incredible. It’s going to be a really long wait until this comes out because I’m dying for people to see it.”
Pappas also cleared up one of the stranger credits on her résumé. She is credited with contributing story elements to Doug Liman’s “Road House,” but her connection to the remake began long before Jake Gyllenhaal started slapping people in the Florida Keys.
“Way before it was a Jake Gyllenhaal movie, it was a Ronda Rousey movie,” Pappas revealed. “I wrote the movie for Ronda. I went to her fight in Vegas, and then she was knocked out pretty quickly. Then the movie shifted and became Jake’s movie.”
“Lucky” premieres Wednesday, July 15, on Apple TV with its first two episodes. New episodes arrive weekly through August 19. Listen to the full conversation below.
Bingeworthy is part of The Playlist Podcast Network, which includes Deep Focus, The Discourse, and more. We can be heard on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and most places where podcasts are found. You can stream the podcast via the embed within the article. Be sure to subscribe and drop us a comment or a rating, as we greatly appreciate it. Thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe and drop a rating.
Mike DeAngelo is a film writer, podcaster, and entertainment journalist whose work has appeared in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, and beyond. He is the host of The Playlist's podcasts The Discourse and Bingeworthy.
