“Press is never my favorite,” admits Gabriel Basso, a touch apologetically, in the midst of his latest press tour. The 31-year-old actor does his best to stay on the outside of the Hollywood machine: when not in Istanbul or the Dominican Republic shooting “The Night Agent,” he lives in South Carolina, and once he wraps various press commitments in New York, he’s off to the mountains of Utah for some time in nature.   

“I think it’s important to insulate yourself from the machine, because it is an echo chamber in a lot of ways,” Basso says, from Netflix’s New York offices. “You can exist in this business and never actually have to leave this business, and I don’t think that’s healthy.”

Basso is the star of “The Night Agent,” which returned for a third season on Thursday. The show follows Peter Sutherland Jr., an FBI agent whose job is to man a phone overnight in the basement of the White House. One night the phone rings, and it sets off a series of expeditions that has Peter solving cases worldwide. 

Season One of “The Night Agent” debuted on Netflix in 2023 and became an instant hit. Basso sees the new season as a return to what made the show successful from the get-go. 

“I think that Season Three is going to be one of the more popular seasons,” Basso says. “It did what Season One did really well. I think Season Two, the size of the show sort of freaked everybody out. No one was anticipating the success of Season One. So I think Season Two, everyone was like, ‘OK, what is this show?’ But Season Three, I think they figured it out.”

Action is first and foremost for the character of Peter, but Basso also enjoys the “consistency” in playing him. 

“There’s constantly a challenge that he’s facing. So it’s always interesting to sort of do something physical, but on top of doing something intense all the time,” he says. “He’s objective, but then his whole environment is subjective. So it’s like, where do you apply this consistency when everything around you is changing? It’s like fighting smoke: you want to hit something solid and tangible but that it’s just everything is always disappearing.”

The intensity of Peter’s world is mirrored in how Basso approaches being an action star. 

“There’s a great Japanese book called ‘Hagakure,’ and there’s a quote in there that anything I’m doing, I try to take it and apply it through that filter: ‘give yourself over to insanity and sacrifice yourself to the task,’” Basso says. “And that to me, is especially relevant with acting or directing or writing even, because you’re serving a plot, you’re serving a narrative, and there should be some sort of surrender. If you’re about to take a hit or if you’re about to fall down some stairs, don’t call ‘cut’ and sub in the stunt double. I get there are insurance things and other logistical problems, but the willingness to do it, I think, is what it takes because you’re getting paid an egregious amount of money. Your job is to entertain people. You’re serving the plot, take the hit.”

The experience of seeing “Gladiator” when he was 14 still stays with Basso as the marker he’s trying to hit with how his work leaves viewers. 

“It’s just wild that a two-hour experience changed my life as a kid. And I was thinking about how quickly metabolized things are now,” he says. “You’re asking for people’s time, but then it doesn’t feel like there’s a respect for that trade-off. People and audiences are being treated like slot machines sort of, where it’s like give me your time, give me your money. And they almost feel entitled to it. That’s the inversion of what it should be. [With ‘The Night Agent’] we asked for 10 hours of people’s time and people felt like they walked away and that the trade was honored.”