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Andrew Lincoln and Richard Armitage may have made the thrilling helicopter rescue scene in the premiere of “Strike Back: Origins” look easy, but it wasn’t.

Armitage, who plays soldier John Porter in the series now airing on Cinemax, nearly fell out of the chopper, he says in a new behind-the-scenes video Cinemax filmed in the past two weeks. (Lincoln totally has his Rick Grimes look from “The Walking Dead.”)

“I thought I was clipped in and I wasn’t and I started to slide to the edge of the chopper,” Armitage says. “He just grabbed me … He saved my life, literally.”
Lincoln, who stars as Section 20 boss Hugh Collinson, says both men nearly fell out at different times, adding that at one point Armitage yelled at him to stop firing his weapon because the spent shells were hitting Armitage.

“I may have saved his life,” Lincoln says, “but I was burning his face as I did it.”
The actors and co-executive producer and director Dan Percival are featured in the video you can watch below.

In this week’s second episode, airing at 9 p.m. CT Nov. 1, Porter splits from the Section 20 team to return to the site where he and Collinson rescued an kidnapped British exec last week. He hopes to infiltrate the fundamentalist group that has kidnapped journalist Katie Dartmouth (Orla Brady).

Collinson is forced to let Porter continue his pursuit and, as you can see in the exclusive clip above, asks his superiors to OK a support team for Porter. On the ground, Section 20 operative Layla Thompson (Jodhi May) tracks Porter.

The second clip below show Porter, now captured by the fundamentalists, trying to stop them from executing Dartmouth.

The episode was written by Jed Mercurio and directed by Percival, who was the chief architect of the series.

Each week I’ll add new episodic photos to the “Strike Back: Origins” photo gallery you can find in the related items on the left or by clicking this link.

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