When we first meet John Creasy in Man on Fire, the Special Forces soldier is an operator without equals. It doesn’t last. When a mission in Mexico City goes sideways and his entire team is killed, Creasy is bereft. Flattened by PTSD, he finds a job loading boxes at a warehouse, and drinks himself into driving his car into a wall at full speed. 

“Creasy is ultimately a guy who has been hurt,” star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II tells Tudum. “He lost some comrades in the field that he was supposed to be responsible for, and what that has left him with is a fear of opening up, a fear of getting close to someone, and a fear of experiencing that hurt again.”

So when his old friend Paul Rayburn (Bobby Cannavale) tries to coax him back into action with a security job in the employ of Brazil’s President Carmo (Billy Blanco Jr.), Creasy is resistant. “Rayburn comes and offers him a path back,” writer and showrunner Kyle Killen tells Tudum. “Creasy is skeptical when he first meets Rayburn’s family. He’s hesitant to even speak to anybody, or touch anybody. The kids want to come hug him and he sort of recoils. That’s where he’s beginning.”

Creasy is still trying to run away from his past, and it puts him on a collision course with his future, Rayburn’s daughter, Poe (Billie Boullet). 

When we first meet the teenager, she’s trying to do the opposite of Creasy: go back to a place that no longer exists. Forced to move all over the world with her ex-military father, she’s desperate to return to her old home, and constantly clashing with parents she views as overbearing. 

It’s a relationship that ends in tears. Through a stroke of tragic luck, both Poe and Creasy are absent from the Rayburns’ home when a bomb tears through their apartment building, killing them and scores of other civilians. Creasy, fresh off a drunken street fight with a pair of ill-fated muggers, rushes back to find Poe, who witnessed the attack. The sole surviving Rayburn was on her way back from a party after an argument with her father.

Cannavale only appears in the first episode, but his absence hangs over the series. “You needed somebody with Bobby’s outsized presence,” Killen says. “He is the kind of person that can make an impression in one episode that you’re still thinking about all these other episodes later. You can understand the size of the hole that he leaves, both for Poe and for Creasy.”

Creasy didn’t plan on being the only stable force left in Poe’s life, but it grants him the purpose he was missing. “He needed something to care about other than himself,” Abdul-Mateen says. “Once he found something outside of him to care about, then that gave him motivation and drive, and a reason to live.” 

“Some guys, you have to light a fire under them to get him going,” Rayburn told Creasy before he died. “My job is to stack wood in your general vicinity because I know sooner than later you’re going to light your own fire.” This Man on Fire is now well and truly lit.

Read on to find out how Creasy uncovers the truth of what happened to Poe’s family, and much more. 

Who did Poe see on the motorcycle?

Before her family was killed, Poe had a brief run-in with a suspicious motorcyclist and a series of vans. Poe may not know much, but it’s too much for the people who blew up the building. When she tells Creasy, he alerts President Carmo’s right-hand man Soares (Thomás Aquino) and tries to get Poe safely out of the country on a private jet. But the men who killed her family have other plans. 

Soon an ambush squad strikes the plane and kills the pilots, and Creasy is back in action. “The cool thing about this show is we’re not watching someone that’s at the top of his game,” Abdul-Mateen says. “We're watching someone who is trying to rebuild himself and who has doubts about whether he can still do the thing that he’s always done.” 

But this is still the Creasy who, only the night before, drunkenly took out two muggers single-handedly. A heated gunfight leaves Creasy chasing a car full of killers, which in turn is chasing Poe’s jet as it drifts down the runway. Creasy leaps on board and takes out the attackers, only to be forced to (briefly) fly and crash-land the plane.

“He has to really dig deep to see what he’s made of,” Abdul-Mateen says. “I think this is a testament to how skilled he actually is. It was fun to tell that story in different ways, whether that’s having another drunk fight after the bar, or whether that’s all of a sudden finding myself riding the adrenaline and flying a plane.”

In reality, the plane sequence was a bit simpler than it looks. “Thank God for green screen and for [director] Steven Caple Jr.,” Abdul-Mateen laughs. “All I really had to do was sit inside an extremely well-built set and use my imagination.” 

That doesn’t mean it was easy. “We had an amazing stunt team, because there were some stunts, like jumping from the car to the plane,” Abdul-Mateen adds. “And then we had the fight choreography that took place on the plane. It’s a huge sequence that probably took about maybe a month to prepare, and I'm sure it took even longer for the actual team to go in and set it up.” 

Once the plane is back on the ground, Creasy and Poe head into hiding, with the help of local driver Valeria Melo (Alice Braga); Creasy agrees to help her get safe passage out of Brazil in return. And on top of everything on their plate, the trio has an unlikely guest: Creasy has taken one of the terrorists hostage.

Who betrays Creasy?

Creasy’s next move is an original one: He fakes photographs of his and Poe’s dead bodies, allowing them to operate in secret. He’ll need all his wits about him; back in the United States, his old CIA ally Tappen (Scoot McNairy) has turned heel for mysterious reasons. He wants Creasy dead. 

While Melo takes Poe to a safe hiding place in the favelas, Creasy interrogates his captive, Tiago (Elzio Vieira). Tiago points him in the direction of Gabriel Estevas, a.k.a. Osmar (Ismael Caneppele), a terrorist leader, but dies in a shootout after leading Creasy into a trap.

With his source eliminated, Creasy goes directly to the top. Infiltrating Estevas’ home, he takes his family hostage and demands answers. Estevas loses a finger, and Creasy gets another name: Emanuel Ferraz (Ravel Cabral). 

At the same time, Poe is bonding with favela teen Livro (Jefferson Baptista). Livro has his own complicated relationships to deal with: abusive older brother Beto (Bruno Suzano) and gang member Vico (Iago Xavier) both have their own goals for the young man. But when Poe and Livro are kidnapped by Gray Beard (Daniel Chagas), Creasy has to trade Osmar to get them back. 

It’s a moment that makes Creasy realize just how much Poe means to him, and he’s sent spinning into a PTSD episode that recalls the last time he lost someone he was supposed to protect. “They’re finding each other,” Abdul-Mateen says of Creasy and Poe’s growing bond. “It’s built on trust. It’s built on the words that are not said, in between the lines.” So there’s no question that Creasy will make his trade. 

After the exchange goes through, the information Creasy passed along to the CIA pays dividends. Brazilian authorities bust the terrorist cell, and Estevas shoots himself. But back in the United States, Tappen knows this story isn’t over. “I will take him and the girl out myself,” he says over the phone. 

Why was Rayburn killed?

Creasy’s next step towards unraveling the conspiracy is easier said than done: To interrogate Ferraz, he needs to break into prison. With the help of his Russian colleague Ivan (Alex Ozerov-Meyer), Creasy begins to spin a new plan — but an unlikely ally offers him another way in. Vico has experience smuggling drugs into prison, and a motive to help them: His sister was killed by gang violence, and despite his gruff exterior, he doesn’t want to see Livro go the same way.

Vico steals keys from Livro’s brother, and helps Creasy infiltrate the prison in a stolen uniform. Smuggled in on a maintenance cart, Creasy is nearly stopped when Tappen clocks his plan on security footage and locks down the prison. But a few judiciously deployed smoke bombs allow Creasy to get to Ferraz and finally extract some answers.

And Ferraz has plenty of answers. He admits to helping frame Creasy for the bombing, a task he accomplished under the orders of President Carmo and Soares, who orchestrated the bombing as a false flag to seize greater power. And he tells Creasy the most horrifying truth: Tappen directed the entire operation as part of an American power grab. He even switched the target to try to take out Creasy and Rayburn, whom he viewed as too smart to live. Sooner or later, they’d be onto him.

“Tappen had a certain ambition, and that required Creasy to get out of the way,” Abdul-Mateen says. “All roads lead to Tappen and Tappen’s trail of destruction.”

McNairy played the role not as a swaggering supervillain, but as a man who believes he’s doing the right thing. “His take on the character was that this is the sort of decision that people in his position make all the time,” Killen says. “They’re looking at geopolitical consequences, not individual harms. And sometimes moving the chess pieces on the board means that people get hurt, but his focus has to be on, ‘How do we win?’ ”

Creasy makes moves for an explosive escape, but Ferraz’s family is still in harm’s way as one of Tappen’s bargaining chips. Ferraz returns to his cell to protect them, leaving Creasy with no evidence to back up his story. As the bombs he set in the prison reach zero, Creasy escapes with the help of Melo, Livro, and Vico and a massive armored truck. 

“We wanted to be big and creative, but find the human elements in all of those things, and to find Brazil in it,” Killen says. “The prison itself was deeply modeled on what’s there.”

Back at the villa, Poe and Melo’s daughter Marina (Pâmela Germano) make a desperate escape from Tappen and a squad of hitmen. They reunite with Creasy, who promises he has one more card up his sleeve.

How does Creasy take out Tappen?

Creasy’s initial plan to deal with Tappen is to go out in a blaze of glory, turning himself in and killing Tappen in the process. He’s hurting deeply after learning that his move to Brazil inspired Tappen to blow up Rayburn’s building. “Everybody around me keeps dying, and I keep on making it out, and I don’t know why!” he yells to Melo as he tries to convince her that his self-sacrifice is a necessary move.

Melo isn’t having it. “If you do this alone and don’t come back to Poe, she will suffer all over again,” she tells him. “Because she needs you. Not just to finish this, but to survive what comes after.”

Abdul-Mateen and Braga give the scene a raw emotional power. “We always tried to bring more than what was on the page, and we were given a lot to work with on the page,” Abdul-Mateen says of working with her. “We said, ‘OK, what more can we do? How can we make sure that the interactions between these two characters have some real depth and some real stakes?’ ”

In Creasy’s next scene with Poe, he takes the lesson Melo was trying to teach him to heart. The young woman is sobbing over old family photos, newly accessed after she figured out her father’s laptop password. “I thought it would make me feel better, but it’s like all the memories have been poisoned,” she tells him.

Creasy talks her through one of the memories, a family vacation where a stranger told them they were a beautiful family. “That’s not poison,” he says. “Everything you care about, it’s all still in there. That doesn’t mean that you won’t have pain. But you don’t have to go through that alone.”

The scene was shot late in production, when Abdul-Mateen and Boullet had already built a rapport. “The work was easy by then, and Billie’s so strong that really, all I had to do was just listen,” Abdul-Mateen says. “Life has ups and downs and you have to remember to be able to find the highs, even in the midst of the lows. That’s an important message for Creasy to impart to Poe, but also an important message for Creasy to be able to tell to himself.”

The relationship between Poe and Creasy is the story of the season. “I think he finally sees that it’s not about her needing someone, it’s about the fact that she’s turning into him,” Killen says. “She has exactly the same situation that he found himself in. She is suffering from PTSD in a way that she feels like the memories she’s been so eager to get back, the pictures that she wants to look at, they’ve been ruined or poisoned. They now summon this tragedy. And that’s exactly the situation that he’s in.”

If he hasn’t already realized it, this moment takes self-sacrifice off the table for Creasy. His plan to trap Tappen is underway; a staged robbery at an apartment building leaves Vico in the hands of the authorities, and Creasy phones the president with a promise that he’s coming for him.

Having already executed Ferraz, Tappen and Soares interrogate Vico, who tells them that Creasy is on the trail of a safe deposit box containing a tape of the president ordering the bombing, allegedly recorded by Ferraz before his death. Desperate to cover up potential evidence of their crimes, Soares and Tappen raid the box and recover a tape — but it’s not what they expected. Instead of incriminating audio, they hear Creasy, telling them the safe deposit box contained a toxic gas that will kill them in less than an hour.

Soares and Tappen rush to the hospital, where Poe is waiting to lead them to Creasy. A heated brawl ensues, and Tappen almost gets the upper hand on his old ally, who’s once again flattened by PTSD. But when he remembers the relationships that have gotten him through this ordeal — with Poe and Melo especially — he muscles through and stabs Tappen to death with a scalpel. “This is for Rayburn,” he says. 

But it’s not over yet. Soares grabs Poe, determined to hurt Creasy even if the game is over for him. This time, Poe saves herself, using a move Creasy taught her to escape from her captor’s grasp. Creasy takes a shot to the chest, but eliminates Soares.

What happens to Creasy and Poe at the end of Man on Fire?

Cut to a few months later, and Brazil is entering a new era. Livro and Vico are working with Ivan. Melo and Marina sit in a seaside café, watching news coverage of Carmo’s arrest and Creasy’s exoneration. An old neighbor approaches, asking if they’re really leaving home. “We’re not going anywhere,” Marina responds.

“Maybe if enough of us stay worried, that’s how things can improve,” Melo adds. 

“Ultimately through her partnership [with Creasy] she comes to the conclusion that it’s not as out of their hands as any of them believe,” Killen says of Melo. “They can make a difference, and they can turn the place they live into the place that they want to stay.”

Poe, meanwhile, is living with her grandmother, and speaking at a memorial for her family. “The last time I saw my family, I wasn’t at my best,” she says. “And sometimes, it feels like that regret is going to swallow me whole.” But Poe has found a way forward, thanks to her memories of her family, her knowledge that the future is bigger than her regret, and her friendship with Creasy, who survived his wounds and is sitting front and center. 

Creasy has come a long way from the man who saw every person through the eyes of a surgeon. “He adopted this philosophy, because it lets him shut other people out and focus on the problem,” Killen says. “And it excuses his inability to get close to people. But I think by the end of the season, he’s almost hearing the same thing from Tappen, and he’s realizing that the further you go down that road, the more you treat people like puzzles, the less they become human, and the less you care about what you do to any number of them. And that’s toxic for your soul.”

Where he once saw a puzzle to solve, Creasy now sees a friend. But a call from Director Moncrief (Paul Ben-Victor) might just send Creasy to a very different place than taking Poe out for lunch. 

On the phone, Moncrief first thanks Creasy for taking Tappen out, and offers him a new opportunity: to pursue the men who killed his team in Mexico City. It’s an irresistible offer for Creasy. “Send me what you got,” he says.

Abdul-Mateen is eager to know what comes next for the character. “I would like to see some flashes of the old Creasy before the incident,” he says. “I would like to see him more in his element in a charming type of way, because he’s definitely got that to him, but he also has this dangerous quality that I think is important for Creasy to keep.” This man on fire is back at the top of his game. 

Man on Fire is now streaming on Netflix.