Netflix had plenty of big shows break into the spotlight in 2025, but few did so as forcefully as The Hunting Wives. Netflix debuted all episodes of the psychological thriller at the end of July, and it took over streaming on its way to becoming one of the platform’s most popular binges of the summer. The show follows Sophie O’Neil (played by Brittany Snow), who moves to Deep East Texas and succumbs to the socialite charm of Margo (played by Malin Akerman), only to find herself in a web of obsession, seduction, and murder. Netflix renewed The Hunting Wives for Season 2, and production on the show’s sophomore outing has already wrapped.
One star from The Hunting Wives, who featured in a recurring role in Season 1, was Karen Rodriguez, who plays Deputy Wanda Salazar. Rodriguez has been bumped to a series regular in Season 2. During an upcoming episode of Collider Ladies’ Nightwith Perri Nemiroff to talk about The Hunting Wives and Spider-Noir, Rodriguez explained whether she saw this promotion coming, “No, it was totally a surprise, and I think it was totally the response and the fans saying, ‘We need the juxtaposition,’ We are watching the baddies, but we need that pillar of goodness to kind of give some danger, like somebody might catch them, you know?” she told Nemiroff. “I also think she’s just an aspirational character. She’s incredibly smart, and she’s so tenacious, and I think that we all want a friend like that, or we all want to believe we’re like that. I mean, definitely when I play her, I feel like a damn superhero. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever felt.”
Nemiroff also asked Rodriguez what, if anything, about her evolved role caught her by surprise, and she went deep into detail about Salazar’s role as the emotional pillar and a grounding force for the often highly outrageous series. She also spoke about how playing the character has helped teach Rodriguez to advocate for herself:
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“It caught me by surprise at the ownership, because she is our main POV of that storyline, and I hadn’t had that experience, really. So, I have the privilege of, like, when I’m on set, she’s our main way in the cop world, right? She’s the emotional pillar of that storyline. And so having to kind of step into, like, ‘I’m not following the lead of somebody else,’ it’s like, ‘No, I’m the one that has to do that,’ and I never had that privilege to do it. So it was very much, again, like stepping into my power.
But I will say thank goodness for Salazar because the character makes it easy, because that is what she’s in constant conversation with. She’s like, ‘I’m the one that has to fix it,’ or ‘I’m the one that has the nose for it.’ So, yeah, stepping into my power. These are the things that they don’t teach you in actors’ school. They don’t talk about, like, there’s something about advocating for yourself, and just being a bad bitch on set.”
When Nemiroff moved forward and asked Rodriguez what challenged her as an actor about stepping into a large role, she told Collider, “What a wonderful question. Yes, I think just remaining open to her. This is a truthful answer.” She went on to explain that though Salazar has a sense of innocence, “her exterior is very hard, and she’s been through so much.” Rodriguez explained, “So that constant push and pull of not letting things in, but then still remaining so soft and gooey on the inside so that things can seep out, and then you couple that with my life and whatever I’m going through… Because I identify with her in that way. I just want to seal up. But she has an innocence that she has somehow fiercely protected, and I tapped into my own at having to be soft again. Oh gosh, I’m not gonna front, sometimes it was really tough.”
However, like all great actors, Karen Rodriguez is ready to meet these challenges head-on and overcome them. She admits that “no work is wasted,” and says, “There’s good work, and you can learn from it. That’s why you’re an actor, right? That’s why you do it. It does teach you about yourself.”
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Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
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Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s
🔬House
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🩺Scrubs
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01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
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02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
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03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
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04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
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05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
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06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
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07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
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08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
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Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
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Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
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County General Hospital, Chicago
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.
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Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
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Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
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Sacred Heart Hospital, California
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
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‘The Hunting Wives’ Season 2 Is Going To Exceed Your Wildest Expectations
The Hunting Wives was written and created for TV by Rebecca Cutter, who is also famous for her work writing episodes of Hightown, Gotham, and The Mentalist. Cutter produced one of the wildest seasons of TV of 2025 with The Hunting Wives, and Rodriguez tells Collider that fans can expect to see even more intensity from Season 2:
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“I would say you don’t have to worry. You’re in good hands with Rebecca Cutter. There came a point where we were getting the episodes like a week before we shot, so we’re reading it, and literally, I mean, I have never seen cast and crew go to set and be like, ‘Did you read this episode?’ I mean, we were shook. And I told you, Season 1, when I read, I was like, ‘No!’ Season 2, I would have to put the script down and walk away. I’m like, You’ve got to be…” And also, being in conversation with the fans, I thought, ‘Oh, I’m so excited to hear what they’re going to think about that.’ I’m really excited.”
Plot details about The Hunting Wives Season 2 are being kept under wraps at this time. Additional cast members include Dermot Mulroney (Chicago Fire) as Jed, Chrissy Metz (This Is Us) as Starr, Jaime Ray Newman (Dopesick) as Callie, Katie Lowes (Scandal) as Jill, and Evan Jonigkeit (Sweetbitter) as Graham.
Check out the first season of The Hunting Wives on Netflix and stay tuned to Collider for Rodriguez’s full episode of Ladies Night.
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