Jonathan Millar 
James Oconner 
Who Is Josie in Special Ops: Lioness? Getting to Know Genesis Rodriguez’s Character Across Seasons 2 and 3
© Paramount+
When Special Ops: Lioness moved into its second season, the show shifted into a new kind of danger. Joe (Zoe Saldaña) and her team were dealing with a growing national security threat along the U.S.-Mexico border, and that meant they needed someone new for the Lioness program. That’s where Josie Carrillo comes in, played by Genesis Rodriguez. She’s not simply a replacement for Cruz from Season 1, and the show doesn’t treat her that way either. Josie comes from a very different background, and her journey across the series is about watching her figure out whether she can survive the strange, brutal world Joe is pulling her into.
Genesis Rodriguez Gives Josie Some Real Weight
Genesis Rodriguez had already built up a pretty varied résumé before joining Lioness. Viewers may know her from The Umbrella Academy, where she played Sloane Hargreeves, or from Man on a Ledge, Big Hero 6 (in which she voiced Honey Lemon), and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Those are very different roles, so there was no obvious reason to assume she would slide into a Taylor Sheridan action thriller and look completely at home.
She does, though. Rodriguez plays Josie as someone who is confident in some situations and completely unsure in others, which feels much more believable than the usual television supersoldier who seems to know everything the minute the mission starts. She has the physical presence the role needs, but she also gives Josie a certain nervous energy underneath it. There is always a sense that she understands how serious the situation is, even when she doesn’t quite know how to handle it yet.
That becomes especially important when she’s sharing scenes with Zoe Saldaña, because Joe has very little patience for people who aren’t ready to do what the job requires. Josie isn’t weak, but she isn’t finished either. She has to be pushed, trained, and tested—sometimes pretty harshly—and Rodriguez does a good job of showing the person underneath all that pressure.
Josie Is a Very Different Kind of Lioness
Season 1’s Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira) came into the Lioness program with a completely different set of strengths. Cruz was an enlisted Marine who came from an abusive background and had to fight her way through basic training. Josie is a Marine Corps Captain, and while that makes her highly capable and trained in military leadership, it doesn’t automatically prepare her for the kind of covert undercover work Joe expects from her.
That’s a big part of what makes Josie’s story interesting. She already knows how to operate as an officer, but secretly infiltrating a cartel network is a very different job. Joe has to take the skills Josie already has and turn them into something useful for a CIA operation where trust, deception, and patience matter just as much as physical ability.
There are also personal connections tied up in Josie’s story that make the recruitment far less straightforward. She isn’t entering the program simply because someone noticed she was exceptionally good at her job. Her family ties to the target network make her uniquely useful to Joe, turning the assignment into a personal, high-stakes operation.
What Is Josie Being Asked to Do?
Season 2 moves the Lioness operation closer to home, with the team looking into a national security threat connected to the border. The danger is no longer happening thousands of miles away in a distant war zone; it’s much closer, giving the narrative a different sort of tension.
Josie’s job is to get inside a dangerous network where cartel interests and foreign threats overlap. To do that, she has to get close to people who could kill her very quickly if they realize what she’s doing. The basic Lioness strategy hasn’t changed: build trust, get close enough to the target network, and quietly gather the information the CIA needs.
The difficult part is that Josie can’t simply switch off her real emotions while doing it. She has to convince people that she belongs there, which means the relationships she forms start feeling real even when she knows they’re part of an assignment. That’s always been one of the nastiest parts of the Lioness concept. The closer the operative gets to the target, the harder it becomes to remember where the performance ends.
Joe and Josie Don’t Always See Things the Same Way
A central dynamic is the relationship between Josie and Joe, as well as the guidance she receives from Season 1 veteran Cruz, who steps into a support role to help Josie navigate the ordeal. Joe knows exactly what this world can do to somebody, and she isn’t interested in pretending otherwise. She pushes Josie hard because she knows that hesitation can get her killed, but there are also moments when it becomes clear that Joe is trying to figure out how much pressure Josie can actually take.
That creates friction between them. Josie isn’t Cruz, and trying to turn her into another version of Cruz would be a mistake. She has her own instincts, her own limits, and her own reasons for being in the military. Joe has to learn how to work with those differences while still preparing Josie for an assignment where a single bad decision could end everything.
Josie doesn’t simply become a perfect operative after a few training sessions. She’s still learning. She still has moments where the emotional side of the job catches up with her, and that’s what makes the character watchable. There is an actual person underneath the mission.
The Real Cost of Becoming a Lioness
Josie’s story gets at one of the biggest ideas in Special Ops: Lioness: you don’t just finish a mission and suddenly become the person you were before it started. The obvious danger is getting shot or caught, but the stuff that stays in your head can be harder to shake. Josie spends so much time pretending to be somebody else, earning people’s trust while secretly working against them, that eventually the fake version of herself starts getting mixed up with the real one.
And that’s what separates her from the usual action hero. Josie isn’t some cold operative who can kill somebody in the afternoon and then sit down for dinner as if nothing happened. She knows the job matters, she knows people could die if she fails, but that doesn’t mean the choices stop bothering her. Lioness doesn’t hand her some neat little answer for how she’s supposed to live with all of it, either. A lot of the time, she just has to carry it.
Genesis Rodriguez plays that uncertainty without making Josie seem weak. She is still a soldier, she can still handle herself and she’s perfectly capable of getting her hands dirty when the situation calls for it. But there is a softer side to her that keeps peeking through, sometimes at the worst possible moment, and that makes her feel like an actual person instead of another highly trained weapon the CIA happens to keep in a room.
Season 3: Josie Is Becoming a Senior Operative
By Season 3 of Special Ops: Lioness, Josie is in a very different place from where she started. The woman who once needed Joe and the rest of the team watching her every move is no longer being treated like the new recruit who might crack under pressure. She’s been through enough by now that the show can trust her with more responsibility, and that changes the way she fits into the team.
She’s operating with much more independence in the field and taking part in international missions alongside Joe and the others as the threats around them get bigger. Josie isn’t standing around waiting for someone to tell her what to do anymore. She has experience now, and even though she still has plenty to prove, there is a confidence in the way she handles herself that wasn’t there before.
The interesting part is that Season 3 doesn’t pretend everything she went through in Season 2 simply disappeared because she survived. The undercover work, the lies and the choices she had to make still follow her around. That’s important because becoming better at the job doesn’t mean becoming immune to what the job does to you.
Josie is therefore caught in a slightly awkward place. She’s more capable than ever, more trusted and increasingly important to the Lioness program, but she’s also carrying all the emotional baggage that came with getting there. The show seems much more interested in that contradiction now. She can walk into a dangerous operation and know exactly what she’s doing, while still having to deal with the pieces of herself that the earlier missions left behind.
That makes her growth more interesting than simply giving her a bigger title. Josie isn’t just moving up the CIA ladder. She’s slowly becoming one of the people the team can rely on when everything goes sideways, and that is probably a much bigger change for her than whatever rank happens to be written on a piece of paper.
Why Josie Matters to the Series
Josie works because the show doesn’t simply try to repeat Cruz’s story. She’s another kind of woman being asked to become a Lioness, with a distinct military background and a very different emotional starting point. That gives the series a chance to explore what happens when someone who is already highly skilled is pushed into a job that requires an entirely different kind of toughness.
Genesis Rodriguez makes that transition believable. Josie can look completely composed in one scene and then seem visibly shaken in the next, and that contrast keeps the character from becoming too predictable.
By carrying her story directly into Season 3, Josie has cemented her status as an integral part of the Lioness narrative. What makes her memorable isn’t simply that she’s tough or good at her job—it’s that the series lets us see what the job is costing her, proving that the real question isn’t whether she can survive the mission, but how much of herself she has to give up to do it.
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