The second season of Starz’s “The Girlfriend Experience” has cast its three leads, the network announced on Thursday.
Anna Friel, Louisa Krause and Carmen Ejogo have joined the cast of the Steven Soderbergh drama. Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz will return to serve as showrunners, writers and directors on the second season.
Season 2 of “The Girlfriend Experience” will feature entirely new characters and plotlines. The 14-episode new season will consist of two parallel storylines, one set in Washington D.C. and one in New Mexico.
Kerrigan’s storyline is set against the backdrop of the corrupting influence of dark money in the upcoming 2018 U.S. mid-term elections, where everything and everyone has a price. This section of the second season of “The Girlfriend Experience” tracks an unexpected and complex relationship between Erica Myles (Friel), a commanding and strong-willed finance director of a Republican super PAC, and Anna Greenwald (Krause), a confident and intelligent GFE provider at the top of her game.
Erica is under intense pressure to deliver on her super PAC fundraising goals. She meets Anna and enlists her help in blackmailing a high-powered dark money fundraiser. After their initial exchange, Erica and Anna fall into a complicated sexual relationship, marked by an exploration of vulnerability, dominance and submission, which also draws in Erica’s manipulative ex-girlfriend. The mix of personal instability and career pressure mount and lead Erica down a path, both professionally and personally, that she struggles to control.
Seimetz’ storyline follows Bria Jones (Ejogo). After discovering disturbing information about a regular client, Jones is forced to relocate to a remote location in New Mexico. Unable to shake her desire for risky relationships and the finer things in life, Bria navigates her new penniless and surreal existence by forming eerily intimate transactional relationships. While Bria’s ghosts from the past continue to haunt, her new connections with men redefine the meaning of the Girlfriend Experience.
“It was always our intention to change the universe every season, but Amy and Lodge have cranked up the ambition, scope, and complexity of the show by creating two storylines even more provocative and confrontational than last year’s. I’m as excited as a Swedish person is allowed to get,” Soderbergh said in a statement.
Soderbergh, Kerrigan and Seimetz will executive produce alongside Jeff Cuban, Andrew Fierberg and Adele Romanski.