Dirty John · LA Times Studios

Bonus Episode: Inside the TV Series "Dirty John" Part 1

May 14, 2025·14 min

The interview opens with Bana almost at the end of the run, days from flying home to Australia after four months on set, with the final scene still ahead. That scene, the climactic violence of the eighth and final episode, is being filmed in a parking lot at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center while the conversation is happening. His path into the project came through his agent, who called while he was in Australia and framed the pitch carefully: it is based on a true crime podcast, and she needed him to hear her out before he answered. He listened over the next couple of days, in his car, and found the material absorbing. The question he brought to the role was simple and hard: what was the internal logic of a man who spent years deceiving the people around him. The conclusion he reached was not the obvious one. John Meehan probably did not really know himself, Bana argues, and that reading changed the job entirely. Sociopaths, he observes, are very good at adapting behavior to get what they need or to seem normal to other people, but that flexibility can sit alongside a real blankness, an absence of self-knowledge rather than its strategic concealment. That framing became the practical foundation of the performance. It led to a specific choice: playing Meehan with a juvenile quality, something closer to a preteen's uncontrolled volatility than to the cold calculation of a polished con artist, someone not quite in command of his own impulses. Jeffrey Reiner directed all eight episodes of the Bravo series, and his instruction to Bana was specific: make him laugh every day on set. The goal for the first episode was for the audience to feel that any woman would be glad to be in John's company, with no alarm bells early on. Bana had to hold the menace back, make Meehan believable and somewhat likable before the later episodes could earn their weight. In real life, Meehan reached for theatrical menace when he wanted to frighten people, telling them to pray hard and to enjoy the time they had together. One voice in the interview describes him as a bad caricature out of a Goodfellas movie, a man trying hard at a version of himself that never quite fits. Bana's task was to make that same figure convincing in a different register, charming enough that the audience's eventual recognition lands with force. The interview notes in passing that Bana had been best known in Australia as a comedian before this role. The conversation has the feel of proximity rather than hindsight: he is still inside the job, still accountable to his choices, with the last scene a shuttle ride away. The performance he is describing is still in progress. What comes through is a portrait of how a performer approaches a figure who is, by design, hard to understand from the outside, and what it takes to live with that difficulty.

As heard by us

A smart companion listen on how Eric Bana shaped John Meehan's charm, childishness, and menace for TV.

Dirty John's bonus episode steps away from the case file and into the machinery of the Bravo adaptation, catching Eric Bana near the end of a four-month shoot as he talks through playing John Meehan. The useful part is hearing Bana resist a neat psychological map.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Eric Bana, in the last week of a four-month shoot, explains how he built a John Meehan who starts out believable, real, and even likable.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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