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Colin Farrell seems like he’s impervious to joining movies and TV shows that don’t have extremely impressive casts, and his crime-thriller mystery Sugar is another notch in his belt of successes on that front. The noir-leaning series, whose Season 2 premiere is now available to stream via Apple TV subscription, is bringing in Better Call Saul great Tony Dalton for Sugar to tangle with, and I talked to the showrunner Sam Catlin and executive producer Audrey Chon about the latest stellar casting choice.
To be sure, Sugar cemented its connection to Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul in Season 1 just by having Catlin as one of its creative forces. Catlin was an EP and writer on Vince Gilligan’s flagship drama — he penned my absolute favorite ep, “Crawlspace” — and presumably had a big hand in getting Anna Gunn (Skyler White) and Dennis Boutsikaris (Rich Schweikart) cast for Season 1. So I had to ask how prevalent Dalton’s role as Lalo Salamanca was in influencing his Sugar casting. According to Catlin:
I mean, there was a lot of crossover from Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. We had crew, we had directors, we had DP that we stole. Always steal from the best. So like, usually if they succeed in Vince's world, then they'll succeed in our world as well.
To his point, Sugar has utilized Saul director Michael Morris for Season 2, as well as camera operator Matt Credle (who worked on BCS and the film El Camino) and Marshall Adams (cinematographer on all three aforementioned Gilligan creations, as well as Pluribus). I think it also helps just a little that the Apple TV series also boasts BB and BCS’ casting directors Sharon Bialy and Sherry Thomas.
But even if none of those details were actually true, it would still make all the sense in the world to bring Tony Dalton into the dark and crime-laden world that Sugar is maneuvering his way through after choosing not to accompany his fellow E.T.s back to their home planet in Season 1. (It’s almost too easy to forget about the first season’s huge game-changing twist.)
Dalton portrays Ray Vega, a lieutenant within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. But despite technically being on the same side of the law as John Sugar, the early promos definitely make him look like an antagonistic roadblock for Farrell's character. It's a change from Season 1, and when I asked Catlin about using the actor as the season's big bad, he told me:
Yeah, we were really excited about giving Sugar a true antagonist. In the structure of last season, he definitely had antagonists, but there wasn't like a main central boss that he had to get past, or whatever. So we knew we wanted to have that, and it was gonna have to be a formidable enough character and a formidable enough actor to sort of face off with Colin. So Tony Dalton was an easy choice when we realized, 'Hey, what about Tony Dalton?' And yeah, he's great.
At this point, EP Audrey Chon chimed in to clarify that locking down the Texas native for the role wasn't a question at all. As she put it:
It actually wasn't, 'Hey, what about Tony Dalton?' It was 'Get Tony Dalton.' And we were very giddy when he showed up on set.
I got giddy just hearing about his casting however many months ago that was, so I can only imagine how excellent it must have been to have him on the set and mixing it up with Farrell and possibly with other Season 2 stars such as Shea Wigham, Raymond Lee, Jin Ha, Sasha Calle and Laura Donnelly.
Watch the Season 2 trailer below to see Tony Dalton making his way into John Sugar's life.
Fans have already seen Tony Dalton pop up on the 2026 TV schedule as Daredevil: Born Again’s Jack Duquesne, a.k.a. Swordsman, but even though he’s wearing a cop uniform instead of a vigilante costume in Sugar, I don’t think his character Ray Vega is that much better of a human being, morally speaking.
Speaking of Breaking Bad and El Camino, Aaron Paul was revealed to be in DCU’s Clayface, which is in a different reality from Farrell’s Penguin and Matt Reeves’ Batman movies, but still seems like a run piece of connective tissue between all these projects. (To bring it all together, Catlin co-developed AMC's Preacher adaptation, which was originally pubbed by DC Vertigo.)
The first episode of Sugar Season 2 is now available to stream, with new installments hitting Apple TV on Fridays.
