Jill Wagner has worked in entertainment for decades, but her most consequential professional move in recent years did not begin in a meeting room in Los Angeles. It began with a conversation at home. Her husband, a serving military officer, told her about a real U.S. program known as Lioness. From that moment, she later said, she knew there was a story worth telling. It took about five years. She did not give up—and the series that resulted, Taylor Sheridan’s Lioness, has become one of Paramount+’s defining action dramas.

Wagner plays Bobby, the tough, highly skilled leader of the Lioness program’s Quick Reaction Force. She is not only in front of the camera. She pitched the concept to Sheridan, stars in the show, and serves as an executive producer. Sheridan, who had once been her acting coach, wrote the role of Bobby specifically for her.

From Acting Coach to Creative Partner

“Taylor Sheridan was my old acting coach, and I had access to him,” Wagner told Parade in 2024. She trusted his voice. “Taylor writes in such an honest and raw way. I didn’t want this show to become Barbies with guns. I wanted it to represent the women I knew and respected in the military, and he’s done that brilliantly.”

Building Bobby required more than a character description on the page. Wagner has said she did not fully understand the role at first and still discovers new facets of the character moments before a take. Research closed the gap. She met and spoke with several women who had served in real Lioness-type roles, then combined traits from those conversations into a single figure. “I took all those personalities and mashed them all together; thus, we have ‘Bobby.’”

One small on-screen detail is personal rather than research-driven: Bobby is rarely without a toothpick. Wagner has said the habit is an homage to her father.

A Military Family—and a Reunion in Afghanistan

Wagner’s investment in the material is rooted in biography. “My grandfather, my uncle and my father were all Marines,” she has said. “My husband currently serves in the Army. I come from a very patriotic family, and I’ve always greatly respected the men and women who serve our country.”

That background made the prospect of a series with women in lead military roles especially compelling. “I have not seen women in the military portrayed in lead roles like this,” she told Parade. “It is important to give these women the moment they deserve on screen while not taking any away from the men who also serve. They both deserve our respect for the sacrifices they make.”

Her husband, David Lemanowicz, is central to both the pitch and her private life. A former professional hockey player, he joined the military after his playing career ended in 2008, became a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve, and was promoted to major in 2020, according to People. He was the person who first described the Lioness program to her.

The couple’s own story has a cinematic quality. They met as teenagers, then lost touch for years. They reconnected in Afghanistan while Lemanowicz was serving in the Air Force and Wagner was greeting troops on a USO tour. “I hadn’t seen her in 17 years,” he recalled on Hallmark’s Home & Family in 2016. His boss sent him to the event; he recognized her from the promotional photo, approached her in the chow line, and walked her through a chain of specific questions—North Carolina, a town outside Greensboro, Monarchs hockey games—until he asked whether she remembered dating the goalie.

At the time both were in other relationships. A year later they crossed paths again in Los Angeles, both single. Wagner has described leaving a dinner with friends, hearing her name, and finding Lemanowicz walking into the restaurant she was exiting. They married in 2017.

Choosing Tennessee Over Hollywood

Wagner left Los Angeles in 2016 after finding a farmhouse in Tennessee that, she told People, initially “looked like a scary haunted house.” She and Lemanowicz were engaged and planning a family. She pictured children in the front yard and wanted to restore the property herself. “I knew it could be fixed. And I wanted to be the one to restore this piece of history.”

They looked first around North Carolina, where she was raised, and found nothing suitable. Tennessee offered the land and the feeling she wanted. “I wanted to get married, and I wanted to have my babies in a place that I thought was magical and, since I was born and raised in the country, that was my idea of what was magical.”

The couple share two daughters: Army Gray Lemanowicz, 6, and Daisy Roberta Lemanowicz, 5. Farm life, by Wagner’s account, is not a backdrop for social media so much as a daily list of repairs. She is often on the front porch by 6:30 a.m., then among her flowers, then listening to her husband catalogue what has broken overnight—the tractor, the fence, the barn roof—before they start fixing it. “That is my typical day,” she has said, laughing.

Full Circle on Screen

Season 3 of Lioness is releasing weekly on Paramount+. For Wagner, the series closes a loop that runs from a military household in North Carolina, through a chance reunion in a war zone, to a husband’s offhand explanation of a classified-feeling program, to a pitch to an old acting coach who happened to become one of television’s most powerful creators.

She did not want stylized heroines with weapons. She wanted the women she had met and respected. Sheridan wrote Bobby for her. She filled the role with the composite truth of real Lionesses—and kept the toothpick for her father. The show’s continued success suggests that audiences, like the woman who spent five years getting the idea to the screen, recognized that the story was worth telling.