Playing Lucky’s grifter dad John — the criminal who raised Lucky to read the room, trust no one and take no shortcuts — is Justified and Deadwood icon Timothy Olyphant.

“For both of us, the thing that leapt out at us from the book was this really complicated father-daughter relationship, exploring everything about that, the nature vs. nurture, the universal theme that we all have to grapple with, individuating from our parents,” Tropper told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.

“Those moments you realize your parents might not be right or might not have the right answer,” he explained.

“We’re taking Lucky on this journey kind of later in life, probably, than it should have happened, realizing that she has been taught from birth to view the world in a sort of really toxic way and it’s left her isolated and alone. To us, building a thriller around this relationship felt like we would never be in danger of NOT making this a character-driven story.”

Pappas agreed.

“The thing that I really honed in on is that while she’s on this propulsive run, and, of course, she has external forces chasing her, there’s this internal battle that’s basically her asking the questions of: ‘What if I’m just like my dad? What if I can’t outrun him? What if his genes are my genes and it’s in my blood?'” she said.

Although Lucky is always trying to escape from people who want to kill her, she does have some time to reflect on these issues when she finds herself injured far from away from anyone who can help her.

“There’s this shot of her, alone in the middle of the desert, struggling to survive, and you’re rooting for her and you wonder how she going to get through this and the irony is that the only skill set, the only tools that she has to get through this, are the ones that her father gave her. So, she runs the risk of becoming more like him in trying to escape.”

The writer-producers said they know how fortunate they are to have gotten this killer cast to come play with them in Las Vegas.

“[Producers] Hello Sunshine and Reese Witherspoon and Lauren Neudstater attached Anya before the book came to Jonathan and, so, for Jonathan and I, when we started digging in, we never wrote a word that wasn’t written with Anya in mind,” Pappas said.

“We always imagined her and she was an executive producer and so she weighed in very early on the character. It was always her and, then, when you have her, then I think it becomes easier to get Annette Bening and then when you have an Annette Bening, it becomes easier to get Timothy Olyphant and it just sort of felt like each one of these actors, we got our first choice,” she added.

“I always joke around that we got lucky on a show called Lucky. That’s how it felt.”