The Tourist stars break down that shocking finale

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the season finale of The Tourist.

Few crime shows have taken quite such a hard turn with their supposed hero as HBO Max's The Tourist. For most of the Australia-set series, viewers were led to believe that, while Jamie Dornan's amnesia-stricken character Elliot Stanley might have done some shady things, he was, at heart, a good person. Then, we discovered in the finale — thanks to a stunning monologue by Victoria Haralabidou's Lena Pascal — that Elliott is actually a heroin smuggler responsible for the death of two people and the mutilation of Pascal. Horrified by this revelation, Dornan's character twice attempts death by suicide and the show's cliffhanger ending leaves the character possibly about to leave this mortal coil.

"I didn't read episode five and six until a week into shooting, which is kind of crazy," says Danielle Macdonald, whose cop character Helen Chambers befriends Elliott on the show. "It was one of those things where I was like, I don't even know how to feel. I did not expect it to go here. It completely took me by surprise. I read it and I wasn't working that week, I was in Sydney visiting my family, and Jamie and Shalom [actress Shalom Brune-Franklin] were working in the Outback, and I was just messaging them, calling them, like, guys, what do we think? What is happening? Oh my gosh! Because you have no idea how people are going to react and I was so close to it at that point that I could not see it clearly. It was an interesting one! Yes."

Dornan admits to feeling "broken" while shooting the sequence in which his character finds out the truth about his identity.

"It was crazy, that," says Dornan. "So much of this character and this performance for me is, like any performance, you're trying to stay present, but never more so than when everything is information that you've never heard before, particularly if it's awful information, like that scene. I felt very raw in that moment, I felt very exposed, and vulnerable and kind of awful and terrible about myself. She was doing such beautiful work in front of me and it was having the impact that I felt that it should have. Sometimes you get yourself in a place where you feel so broken that you can't actually stop crying. [Laughs] I felt a bit like that that day in a good way, I guess. I felt very exposed, very vulnerable. You know, it's hard stuff to hear, the hardest stuff to hear, so a lot of that luckily was on the page for me in terms of the writing. But, yeah, not an easy day, that."

Dornan says he doesn't know at present whether we will learn the fate of his character on the show, which sibling writers Harry and Jack Williams originally planned to not extend beyond this initial season.

"We all signed up for one," says the actor. "But I've been here before. The Fall was meant to be one series. There was big demand for The Fall obviously and we did a couple more. In the UK and Ireland and Australia, and anywhere it's been so far, people seem to love The Tourist, so who knows? I know conversations are being had. So we'll see what we get to, but I would love to."

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