Andy Garcia’s Gallino: Cartel Chess and Oil Power in Landman Season 2

Andy Garcia’s Gallino: How the Cartel Boss Became Landman’s Most Dangerous Player in Season 2

When Landman Season 1 wrapped in January 2025, Andy Garcia’s surprise appearance in the finale felt like a tease. His cartel boss, Gallino, arrived in a hail of gunfire, executed rival Jimenez, and calmly told Billy Bob Thornton’s Tommy Norris they needed to “coexist.”

Less than a year later, that brief cameo has turned into the engine for Landman’s biggest storyline.

Paramount+ renewed the Taylor Sheridan drama in March 2025 and brought Garcia back as a series regular for Season 2. The new season premiered on November 16, 2025, and is scheduled for a 10‑episode run through January 18, 2026. Early numbers show the move paid off: the Season 2 premiere drew more than 9.2 million views in its first two days, a 262% jump over Season 1’s debut, making it the most‑watched original series launch in Paramount+ history, according to the Houston Chronicle.

At the center of that surge is Gallino, now doing business in Fort Worth as “Dan” or “Danny Morrell,” and quietly inserting cartel money into the Texas oil patch.

Season 1 introduced him as a mysterious savior. Season 2 turns him into something far more dangerous: a cartel boss who wants a seat at the table.

From Finale Cameo to Front‑Line Regular

Garcia’s promotion happened quickly, but not accidentally.

In Season 1’s finale, “The Crumbs of Hope,” Tommy is kidnapped and doused in gasoline by cartel enforcer Jimenez. As Jimenez prepares to kill him, Gallino’s crew storms the club, wipes out Jimenez and his men, and cuts Tommy loose. Rather than gloat, Gallino sits across from him and delivers the real message: his organization has “unlimited funds and unlimited connections,” and it makes more sense for them to be friends than enemies.

That one scene reset the show’s cartel storyline. Coverage from outlets like ScreenRant and Esquire immediately flagged Gallino as one of the most powerful figures left on the board, especially after M‑Tex founder Monty Miller’s death.

Behind the scenes, Taylor Sheridan had a longer game in mind. Garcia has said in several interviews that Sheridan wrote the role specifically for him, drawing on his earlier work as a young drug lord in the 1986 film 8 Million Ways to Die. According to Garcia, Sheridan pitched him not just the Season 1 cameo, but a multi‑season arc, and the actor signed on before seeing a full script.

On April 29, 2025, TVLine confirmed that Garcia would return in Season 2 as a series regular, announced alongside Sam Elliott’s casting. Subsequent coverage from UPI and People placed him firmly in the core ensemble with Thornton, Demi Moore, Ali Larter, and others.

By the time Paramount+ rolled out Season 2 in November, Gallino was no longer a wild‑card cameo. He was a pillar of the show’s renewed focus on the uneasy overlap between cartel money and oil money.

Who Is Gallino, Really? Cartel Boss, Financier, “Dan Morrell”

On screen, Garcia’s character first appears under a single name: Gallino, a senior cartel boss operating in and around the Permian Basin. Recaps describe him as a high‑ranking figure in the same criminal organization as Jimenez, but positioned higher up the ladder and less interested in day‑to‑day bloodshed.

By Season 2, that picture gets more complicated.

The show reveals that in Fort Worth business circles he uses the name Dan or Danny Morrell, and fronts a supposedly legitimate finance operation tied to oil deals. SoapCentral explains that, in the new season, Gallino “runs Sonrisa, a bank that lends money to oil companies,” and notes that he does this under the name Dan Morrell, likely as cover for his cartel connections.

Garcia has filled in parts of the backstory that Sheridan left suggestive. In interviews, he describes Gallino as a Cuban or Caribbean figure who grew up in or around Miami, with ties to South America, before moving his base of operations to Texas. When Garcia asked Sheridan where the character really came from, Sheridan reportedly told him, “It’s you,” giving the actor wide latitude to shape Gallino’s history and manner.

The result on screen is a cartel boss who is:

• Polite and charming in public settings
• Fluent in the language of finance and risk
• Still very much connected to organized crime

Decider recently summed him up as “a former cartel leader turned aspiring oil mogul”. That ambition is exactly what drags Tommy, Cooper, and M‑Tex into deeper trouble in Season 2.

Cartel Capital on the Chessboard: Sonrisa and Cooper’s Wells

The key shift from Season 1 to Season 2 is structural. The cartel is no longer just shipping product across ranch roads. It is financing wells.

In Season 2, Episode 2, Cooper finally confesses to Tommy that he has quietly drilled six wildcat wells behind his father’s back. Every one of them has hit. The wells are financed by Sonrisa, an Odessa‑based outfit Cooper presents as a standard backer willing to take a flier on a young landman.

At first, the deal looks almost too good. Sonrisa funds the entire drilling program and, in return, takes only 18 percent of profits after payout. Multiple recaps, including our own Sonrisa explainer on Landman.tv, point out how unusually low that share is for a risky, capital‑intensive wildcat campaign.

Tommy is suspicious from the start. He orders M‑Tex attorney Nate to look past the Odessa address and find the real money.

What Nate uncovers changes the season.

According to Yahoo’s breakdown of the episode, Nate follows the cash from the Odessa front office to a Dallas financial fund, then to the actual person who controls it. The fund’s founder and effective owner is Gallino. Some paperwork lists the man in charge as “Dan Morrell,” which several outlets now treat as an alias that leads straight back to the cartel boss.

Landman.tv’s Cooper breakdown estimates that Sonrisa has put roughly $48 million behind those six wells. That number matters. It means Gallino is not just skimming off trucking routes or demanding bribes. He is directly invested in a producing oil asset tied to Tommy’s son.

When Tommy confronts Cooper, Yahoo reports him spitting out the heart of the problem: Gallino is now Cooper’s partner, and that is “a real [expletive] problem.”

The cartel has moved from the back roads into the balance sheet.

Visiting “Danny Morrell”: Office Chess and the Cattlemen’s Club

By Episode 3 (“Almost a Home”), Gallino has fully stepped into the light.

Tommy goes to Fort Worth and visits his sleek office, where Gallino now operates as Danny Morrell, a respectable financier with polished staff and city views. TVLine’s recap describes this as their first formal meeting since the bloody club rescue in Season 1.

The conversation is tense but careful.

Gallino insists that he has already taken a risk on Cooper because he believes in the kid’s eye for undervalued rock. He frames the Sonrisa deal as both an apology for past brutality and a shared investment in everyone’s future. He notes that Cooper hit six for six on wells other operators passed over.

Tommy is not buying it. As TVLine recounts, he calls Gallino “a [expletive] drug dealer” in a suit. He accuses him of setting up the deal so that, if the price environment shifts or the wells falter, both Norris men will owe him. Gallino, unfazed, counters that his money is “clean” by the time it hits the Texas books, and that Tommy is really angry because he no longer sees trouble coming. Cooper does.

The exchange is one of the clearest examples of the “chess match” that co‑creator Christian Wallace and others have promised. Billy Bob Thornton has said he was interested in showing Tommy squared off against “a smart guy on the opposite side of the law who is his equal,” and this scene delivers that dynamic without a single gunshot.

Later in the episode, their worlds overlap again, this time in public.

Tommy and Cami track a financial fixer to The Cattlemen’s Club, an exclusive Fort Worth spot where oil wealth and old money mingle. After the fixer stonewalls, Tommy smashes a bottle over his head to force answers about Monty’s offshore accounts and shell games. Across the room, Gallino watches the chaos unfold.

Soon after, he and his wife Bella (played by Stefania Spampinato) join Tommy, Angela, and Cami at a table. Entertainment Weekly’s Season 2 cast guide describes Bella simply as the “wife of cartel boss Gallino,” but her presence matters. As the group drinks, Gallino subtly aligns himself with Cami’s need for capital and influence. He hints he could help untangle Monty’s mess. He also draws a straight line between his use of force and Tommy’s bottle‑swinging, nudging Cami to see them as operating in the same gray zone.

Recaps note that Cami leaves intrigued. Angela leaves uneasy. And Gallino leaves having stepped cleanly into the same social circle as the Norrises and their corporate allies.

Cami, M‑Tex, and the Lure of Cartel Cash

If Episode 2 tied Gallino to Cooper, and Episode 3 placed him across the table from Tommy, then Episode 4 pushes him closer to Cami and M‑Tex itself.

By this point, Cami has taken over as Monty’s widow and de facto owner of M‑Tex, while Tommy runs the company as president. As she digs into Monty’s records, she finds a maze of loans, shell companies, and offshore accounts. The empire she inherited is less stable than it looked.

According to Esquire’s recap of Episode 4, that pressure drives Cami to seek new capital. She approaches Danny “Gallino” Morrell, seeing him as a well‑connected Fort Worth financier who can patch the holes and keep M‑Tex afloat. She does not fully understand, or perhaps chooses not to fully confront, how deep his cartel history runs.

It does not go as she planned. People’s ending‑explainer notes that Gallino rebuffs Cami and insists on dealing only with Tommy. The choice is deliberate. His real interest is not in buying a piece of M‑Tex at a discount. It is in maintaining leverage over the man he respects and resents in equal measure.

Esquire calls Cami’s contact with him “reckless,” and underlines that she is now playing with a drug cartel boss, not just a shady lender. Either way, the result is the same: the cartel’s shadow now stretches from Cooper’s secret wells to the M‑Tex boardroom.

Why Gallino Is Landman’s Most Dangerous Player Right Now

Plenty of characters in Landman can pull a trigger. What makes Gallino the show’s most dangerous player in Season 2 is that he has learned to operate without drawing one.

Several pieces of coverage, including SoapCentral’s villain explainer, now simply label him “the villain in Landman Season 2.” But the details of how he operates matter:

• He has direct financial leverage over Cooper’s independent venture, after reportedly putting about $48 million into six producing wells on very generous terms.
• He is embedding himself as a respectable financier in Fort Worth, using the name Dan or Danny Morrell and running Sonrisa as a lending arm to oil operators.
• He is navigating M‑Tex’s crisis through Cami, offering the kind of money and discretion that Monty once used, but with cartel strings attached.
• He maintains a personal hold on Tommy, stemming from the Season 1 rescue and their Season 2 negotiations.

Garcia has stressed in interviews that Gallino does not simply want Tommy dead. He wants him engaged. Decider’s recent profile describes the character’s motives as “money, power, diversification,” but also highlights the mutual respect between the two men. Gallino sees Tommy as useful and as a worthy opponent. Tommy sees Gallino as a man he cannot trust but also cannot easily avoid.

That mix of respect, rivalry, and shared dependence gives the season its central tension. When Thornton talked about wanting to play a “weird position” where Tommy is up against a smart equal across the law’s dividing line, this is what he meant.

From a storytelling standpoint, Gallino also allows Sheridan and co‑creator Christian Wallace to widen the lens. In Season 1, the cartel was primarily an external menace, embodied in violence from characters like Jimenez. In Season 2, with Gallino as a regular, the cartel becomes a capital partner, sitting on the other side of the desk instead of the other side of the border fence.

It is no accident that Paramount+ highlighted the Season 2 premiere’s record‑breaking viewership when it renewed Landman for Season 3 in early December. Coverage in outlets like Esquire and the Houston Chronicle consistently points to Garcia’s expanded villain role, alongside Sam Elliott’s emotional turn as Tommy’s father, as major reasons the show’s second year feels bigger and more urgent.

What Happens Next

As of mid‑December 2025, Landman Season 2 is four episodes into its 10‑episode run, with new installments dropping Sundays on Paramount+ through January 18, 2026. Paramount+ has already ordered Season 3, betting that the blend of oil‑patch drama and boardroom crime will keep viewers hooked.

What is clear already is that promoting Andy Garcia to series regular has changed the shape of the show. Gallino no longer operates in the shadows. He writes checks, sits at private‑club tables, and shows up on the same side of town as Fort Worth’s legitimate power brokers.

Tommy now has to navigate three overlapping problems:

1. A son whose independence is financed by cartel money.

2. A company, M‑Tex, whose past owner left a financial mess that outside capital could easily exploit.

3. A cartel boss who saved his life once and now wants a lasting, profitable relationship.

However Season 2 resolves those threads, the groundwork is laid. Gallino is not just another heavy who comes and goes with a single plot. He is wired into the series’ core questions about power, money, and who really owns the oil under West Texas.

For Landman, and for Tommy Norris, that may be the most dangerous development of all.