Spoilers for Episodes 4 and 5 of Neagley are ahead! You can stream all of Season 1 with an Amazon Prime subscription.
I have a feeling very few people have been asked to get into a pit full of fake dead bodies as part of their job. However, that did happen to Jasper Jones, who plays Keno on the Reacher spinoff Neagley. So, as the show premiered on the 2026 TV schedule, I had to ask him what filming that wild sequence was like.
So, in Episode 4 of Neagley, Keno finds out that the folks at the farm are killing a lot of people and then disposing of the bodies by burning them in a pit. In Episode 5, he winds up in the pit and has to escape it. According to Jasper Jones, they used two pits to film all this:
Yeah, so they built a pit, and there was also a pit that they built on actual land. And it was switching back and forth between those night shoots, all that stuff.
In the sequences, you can see Jones buried in bags full of body parts, both in the back of a truck and in the pit. Notably, once Keno was in the pit, he had to climb out of it. By stacking the bags, he was able to get to the top; however, amid that, he was also dealing with fire that was coming through holes in the giant hole. Speaking about how they did all that on set, Jones told me:
For the pit that they built … they were shooting fire through the holes, and that was a really cool moment. But it was also really intense because there was harnesses, and it's really me jumping a lot of the times, and yeah, it was very intense because you are actually climbing up these things, and you are actually believing that it's body parts that you're climbing on. So it's kind of intense, you know? It's really intense, you know? Now that I'm saying it out loud, I'm like, is this normal? I don't know.
Well, no, I don’t think that’s normal. However, it’s all part of the filmmaking game. Sometimes, the script calls for a pit full of dead bodies, and then the actor has to be around fake ones. While it’s not dangerous or gross or anything, it is, as Jones put it, “intense.”
Funnily enough, right after he said that, his co-star, Greyston Holt, joked that this whole thing is “something the average person goes through.” It certainly isn’t, but it was a very cool, intense and epic moment in the show, and Jones told me it was “great to do the action.”
I have to imagine that wild sequences like this are part of what makes shows like this fun to create. Alan Ritchson has spoken often about his stunts and how hard they can be (remember the Reacher vs. Paulie fight?), and we know Maria Sten can lead an action show. They’re also both very committed to it. It would seem their co-stars have a similar mindset.
Now, to see all of this, and to see Keno get himself out of a pit with dead bodies, you can stream Neagley (which is getting good reviews) on Amazon Prime.
