The Hunting Party‘s Bex and Shane have a lot of fans rooting for their love story — including Melissa Roxburgh‘s Manifest costar Josh Dallas.
“I do know [about them]. I was on set and I am a huge shipper of this,” Dallas, 47, gushed exclusively to Us Weekly about the fictional romance. “I so want this to happen and I think it would be great.”
Dallas urged for the NBC series to lean into the “slow burn” between Bex (Roxburgh) and Shane (Josh McKenzie). Roxburgh, 33, couldn’t help but agree, telling Us that “slow burns are great” when it comes to onscreen love stories.
“What keeps you there episode to episode is the killer and the height of what’s going on and just the craziness of what these killers are doing,” she noted. “But I think what sticks in your brain as you continue through the show is like, ‘But will they or won’t they? What’s going on there? So I think everyone loves a will they or won’t they?’”
The Hunting Party, which premiered in 2025, is a crime procedural about investigators who are assembled to track down and capture the most dangerous killers in the country. The twist? The criminals escaped from a top-secret prison that’s not supposed to exist.
Roxburgh’s character is an ex-FBI agent recruited to the task force due to her reputation as a profiler who caught the world’s most dangerous serial killers. After a past connection with Oliver (Nick Wechsler), who was killed off at the beginning of season 2, viewers have focused all their attention on Bex and Shane.
“As far as the characters go, I am always cheering for the history and the relationships where it’s like they’ve been through so much together,” Roxburgh previously told Us in February 2025. “If they do build this love story and love triangle, Shane is safe and he’s very calm and cool waters. We have the bad boy who murdered someone and he had a reason. We have the person who didn’t murder someone. We’ll see.”
Elsewhere on the show, Roxburgh was able to reunite with Dallas after Manifest in the Thursday, April 2, episode of the hit NBC series.
“I couldn’t have been more thrilled with this character. He’s diabolical, of course. But it was just so juicy and delicious to be able to play somebody whose moral code was so, so different from anything that I’ve ever played before,” Dallas recalled. “But putting that aside, just to be back on the screen and back on set with Melissa was the real high point for me.”
Roxburgh “tried to get Josh on the show” several times before the right role came along.
“I’ve been trying to get him on the show for a long time and then finally he was free,” she shared with Us. “We have been talking back and forth about when that might happen. There was one other episode — I won’t say which one — that we had tried to get him for.”
She concluded: “This was a perfect match for him because his killer is a shoemaker. I know that Josh Dallas likes nice clothes so we got him for the good stuff.”
The Hunting Party airs on NBC Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET and new episodes are available to stream on Peacock the next day.
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