FORT WORTH, Texas — James Jordan is planting a flag in Fort Worth.

The 47-year-old Houston native has spent the last few years living and working in Cowtown on two Taylor Sheridan-created shows in “Lioness” and “Landman.” Jordan plays Two Cups on the spy thriller, and Dale on the oil drama.

Jordan has shot four seasons of television in Fort Worth across both shows, and will return once again to shoot “Landman” Season 3. In fact, he and his wife purchased a home here since they spend so much time in Panther City.

“When we moved into our house in March, there in the Tanglewood neighborhood by TCU, we had neighbors come by with fresh-baked cookies,” Jordan said. “I mean, you just don’t see that anymore, right?”

Ahead of “Lioness” Season 3, Episode 5, which premiered on Sunday, Aug. 30, Jordan spoke to the Star-Telegram about the show.

He also talked about his experience working in Fort Worth and when cameras start rolling on “Landman” Season 3. There are a few spoilers for “Lioness” Season 3 through the fifth episode, so it’s best for folks to be caught up on the show before continuing.

[This interview has been edited for clarity and length.]

Q: We’re three seasons into “Lioness.” What still excites you about this show and makes you ready to come to work every day?

A: What Taylor [Sheridan] likes to do, metaphorically, is explore frontiers. When you explore frontiers, you explore the unknown. Every season is a new world, it’s a new fight. Where are we going to go? Where are the bad guys this time? It’s exciting to go to those places, whether they’re literally overseas or in our own backyard. It’s a lot of fun.

Q: This show is shot in Texas, but not set here. I find that interesting how the show makes the area look like Baltimore or Ukraine.

A: I got to tell you, Fort Worth doubles for a lot of Baltimore in the [Washington] D.C. metro area. We did shoot the first season in the fall of 2022, in the D.C. metro area in Baltimore, but it was great to come to Texas. It was great to come to North Texas and utilize North Texas. The fantastic people there welcomed us with open arms, and we love filming the story there. It’s a lot of fun.

Q: I’m glad we’re chatting about Episode 5, because it feels like it's the “James Jordan Show” for a minute there with the opening strip club to morning after scene. “Lioness” is an ensemble show, so what’s it like for you to read the script and see that you have your own sequence?

A: Well, I’ll tell you what. Whenever Taylor writes a story, he constantly surprises you. So, A, I was very surprised, and B, I like to see Two Cups blurring these moral lines because the stakes couldn’t be higher this season. The first season the fight took us to the sea. The second season the fight took us to the air. The third season the fights come home, literally to Joe’s front porch. They took one of ours, and not just one of our members of this team, but our leader. The stakes couldn’t be higher. It’s life or death here, and Two Cups is willing to do whatever it takes to find Joe and get her back.

Q: I feel like this episode is good showcase for how I see you as an actor. Someone who can do comedy, but on a dot, can turn serious when things get real. It’s the same thing in “Landman” with Dale, how he can be joking with Tommy and then snap into action.

A: Well, thanks. I got to tell you, that’s all in the writing. Taylor’s really done the heavy lifting for you. I said this earlier, all you have to do really is show up, say the words, know the words, hit your mark and tell the truth. Taylor’s designed these characters. It’s all on the page. We just lift them. We give them life. We give them breath. And that’s all credit to Taylor Sheridan.

Q: There’s a scene in this episode where a bad guy shows Two Cups what he thinks are incriminating photos of him with a stripper. How did you shoot the actual photographs that are shown?

A: Professionalism and safety is always the first rule on a Taylor Sheridan set, and respect for each other’s craft and respect for each other’s boundaries. We had a closed set. We had an intimacy coordinator there coordinating the entire scene. Me and a fantastic actress by the name of Madison King, one of our great guest stars you see in that episode, did a wonderful job. She’s a fantastic actress. She’s going to have a big career. We just said, “Hey, look, we’re going to tell this story in that nature.” We did it as professionally and as safely and consensually as we could. You do what you have to do, but you do things safely and you do them professionally with respect for each other. That’s how we approach those sort of scenes.

Q: There’s a funny button on that scene where someone asks Two Cups if he used protection, and he says, “I’m a method actor, bro.” Do you subscribe to method acting at all?

A: Oh, I don’t know. I went to drama school, graduate school at UCLA, which I think is still a fantastic program, I graduated over 21 years ago. Oh my gosh, right? Feels like yesterday. But at UCLA, you’re taught all of it. You’re taught the method. You’re taught Meisner. You’re taught Chekhov. You learn it all in a way that where you kind of fuse and develop your own and distill your own kind of method or system of acting. Yeah, a little bit. I mean, look, the whole point of the method, the biggest takeaway from that is the creator of the method, Lee Strasberg, said, “It’s all about relaxation. The more relaxed an actor is, the less they’re in their head, and the less you’re in your head, the more you can just live in the moment and react with the other actor.”

I subscribe to those sort of tenets of the method, but it’s funny, the process changes with each job, it really does. One movie you’ll approach it one way, and another movie you’ll approach it a different way. It’s all anchored in the script and how the story’s being told from the script. It changes for me all the time, from character to character.

Q: There’s another sequence later in the episode where Joe’s team goes to extract this guy from a college campus. The team parks their cars and positions their doors in a way that reminds me of boxing in cattle. Could you walk me through how you guys pulled that off?

A: We have a fantastic group of technical advisers and a fantastic stunt department led by Wade Allen, one of the best. Do you remember that show “Barry” on HBO? Wade Allen, he stunt-coordinated that whole show, and the stunts in that show are remarkable. We’re very lucky to have Wade on board, and I’ve worked with Wade numerous amount of times because Taylor hires him a lot.

But anyway, we have a fantastic group of stunt actors and technical advisers that just designed that whole sequence, and we just rehearse and rehearse and rehearse until it becomes reflexive, until it’s just what you would do in that situation. It’s exactly like boxing in livestock and then escaping as quickly as you can. That’s all credit to Wade and his team and our fantastic technical advisers.

Q: We talked about Fort Worth briefly and I want to ask you about it again. You made two seasons of “Lioness” and “Landman” here. I believe “Landman” Season 3 starts soon.

A: We start in about two-and-a-half to three weeks. Just after Labor Day, that’s the plan. We’re getting right to work on it. We know people want to see it, so we’re going to get right to work and get it out as soon as we can.

Q: It’s only been a few years since you started coming to Fort Worth to work on these shows, but the filmmaking landscape has changed so much. Taylor has the SGS Studios in north Fort Worth, Texas has much better film incentives. Could speak to just how the production landscape has changed in Fort Worth and across the state?

A: I’m not intimately involved with the sort of bureaucratic apparatus that answers those questions. But I’ll tell you what, the people of Fort Worth have been so welcoming to us. You couldn’t have been nicer, and were welcoming to have movie people come to Fort Worth and tell our stories there. Like I said, my wife and I, we absolutely fell in love with the people there, with the city itself. I was talking to someone a while back there, and I said, “How would you characterize Fort Worth?” And they said, “It’s the biggest little city in the world.” And it’s so true. Everybody knows everybody.

When we moved into our house in March, there in the Tanglewood neighborhood by TCU, we had neighbors come by with fresh-baked cookies. I mean, you just don’t see that anymore, right? That old-fashioned welcoming was so wonderful and warm. We love calling that place our part-time home. It’s really great, but as far as working there, oh boy, North Texas, just the topography and the eclectic environment, you can shoot a number of things there. I think it’s as interesting as California is, when it comes to how eclectic its landscape is. We double D.C. there, we’ve doubled Iraq there, we’ve doubled Mexico there, we’ve doubled Syria there. We’ve shot there in North Texas, all in and around Dallas and Fort Worth, and no one said, “Oh, that’s Denton.” You know what I mean?

It’s exciting to see the film business beginning to thrive there in Texas. I hope it does for a very long time. I know that Taylor isn’t going anywhere. He calls North Texas home and loves it, and he’s a native North Texan. I was born in Texas and love it, and it’s good to be back. We hope we’re not going anywhere for a long time.

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“Lioness” airs Sundays on Paramount+.

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