“I’m pretty much a solo act at this point,” John Creasy (Emmy winner Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) says in the new trailer for Man on Fire, which you can watch above.

“Yeah, how’s that working out for you?” Paul Rayburn (Bobby Cannavale) responds.

Not very well. The onetime Special Forces badass is a bearded recluse after an operation went wrong; he’s working quietly in a warehouse and struggling with his demons. “His trauma is such that he’s afraid to make friends,” Abdul-Mateen tells Tudum. “He’s afraid to open up. He’s afraid to be vulnerable, and that’s kept him in the same place for a very long time.”

But destiny comes calling soon enough, in the form of an old friend. “Rayburn comes and offers him a path back,” writer and showrunner Kyle Killen (Lone Star) tells Tudum. “He’s hesitant to even speak to anybody or touch anybody. That’s where he’s beginning from.” So a damaged Creasy heads to Brazil with Rayburn. But tragedy is waiting in the wings.

When a skyscraper is flattened by a mysterious group of bombers, Creasy returns to duty — not just to hunt down the men responsible, but to protect Rayburn’s daughter, Poe (Billie Boullet), who witnessed the crime. They form an unlikely duo, but maybe Poe will be the one to bring Creasy out of his shell. “I see a lot of myself in you,” he tells her.

The relationship between Creasy and Poe forms the beating heart of Man on Fire. “They’re finding each other,” Abdul-Mateen says. “It’s built on trust. I think it’s a beautiful relationship. Ultimately, they both needed something from each other: Creasy really needed a friend, and Poe needed someone that felt like family.”

And we do mean beating heart: The new series has no shortage of action. The trailer will give you a glimpse at just a few of its set pieces: a prison break, a series of brutal fistfights, and Creasy leaping from a car to a plane. The plane sequence alone took Abdul-Mateen a month to prepare for. “I’m sure it took even longer for the actual team to go in and set it up and make sure that we were safe and things like that,” he says. “Every episode was like a small movie, and when you have something like that in it and where it lands in a real way, I think everybody involved deserves a lot of props.”

But the question remains: Can Creasy really be close to someone? Or is he doomed to remain on the emotional margins, protecting people from a safe distance? “That’s really the story of the season,” Killen says. “Creasy dropping his guard, letting other people in, and then discovering that they can accomplish more as a team than he can as an individual.”

In the end, the person most in need of saving might be Creasy himself. “Creasy has no problems helping someone else, but when it comes to saying yes, allowing himself to be helped — that’s when we see him really struggle,” Abdul-Mateen says. 

Will Creasy prevail? Find out when Man on Fire hits Netflix on April 30.