Note: This story contains spoilers from “Paradise” Season 2, Episode 1.
As soon as Shailene Woodley heard Dan Fogelman’s pitch for her role in “Paradise” Season 2, she admits she was “completely enamored” by the idea: A vignette of an employee at Elvis’ Graceland who hunkers down at the historic site, largely by herself, when climate crisis and nuclear warfare strikes the globe.
With Woodley’s character, Annie, getting a spotlight for the entirety of Episode 1, it’s a less-than-traditional approach to starting a sophomore season, though the threads start coming together by the final moments of the episode, when Annie happens upon Sterling K. Brown’s Xavier after his plane crashes on the way from the bunker to Atlanta. Following up on Season 1’s flashback to “The Day,” the episode, titled “Graceland,” provides the perspective of the crisis from an everyday American, and Woodley took the opportunity to make Annie feel as “real” as she could.
“It was important to me that Annie felt real, that she didn’t have makeup on, that her hair would get greasy, that she would wear the same clothes over and over again,” Woodley told TheWrap. “It was important to match the way that she probably felt internally.”
It was Annie’s ordinary nature that grounded the story for Woodley and distanced it from her previous dystopian project, with Woodley recalling “‘Divergent’ was the study on a future post apocalyptic, elliptic world, and some of the stakes were heightened and reality was tightened — this just felt very real and very ordinary, and something that could happen to any of us at any moment.”
Woodley noted that while Annie had medical skills from her years as a med student, it wasn’t those technical skills that equipped her for a life of survival as much as her experience being alone but not lonely. “I think she was set up in a way to succeed more than possibly other people who didn’t know how to be alone,” she added.
“Annie had suffered so much loss in her life and had experienced a lot of discomfort in her own skin that I think when this happened, it was easier for her to tap into her willpower to survive, because she had lost so much,” Woodley said, referring to her mother’s untimely death. “It was almost out of stubbornness and out of pure rebelliousness that she would be able to last longer than others.”
Woodley’s initial Zoom meeting with Fogelman happened just over a week before production kicked off, with Woodley noting there was no rehearsal for the episode and she only met the directors, Glen Ficarra and John Requa, once before they got on set.
“It was a very, very, very quick turnaround … but I think the fact that it was sort of rudimentary, and … there wasn’t a big scene around what this was going to be, created the backdrop in the landscape for a lot of exploration and intuition,” Woodley said.
All of that exploration took place within what Woodley calls a “faux Graceland,” a replica of the Memphis landmark that immersed Woodley, who admitted she didn’t know anything about Graceland before the show, into the home with contained walls and identical props, including his gold-plated handgun that Annie stashes away for her protection.
“In that way, Elvis and his home became a character,” Woodley said. “For Annie, he became a reflection of the solitude that both of these people experienced in their lives, and then also for me, just selfishly, there’s so much to play off of, whether it was the shag carpet or the mirrored ceilings or the four … analog TVs and the walls … there was a lot of textural inanimate objects that I think kept Annie’s mind sane during her time alone.”
Annie’s solitude, which follows after her friend’s tragic death, is interrupted 689 days after the crisis began, when a group of men arrive at Graceland, but don’t pose the threat that Annie is prepared for. Instead, their visit prompts some community — and the first piece of bacon Annie has had in years — as well as a heartfelt connection with the group’s unofficial leader, Link (Thomas Doherty), with whom Annie shares a tender night after years of being starved for human connection.
Much like the episode as a whole, there wasn’t too much preparation for Annie and Link’s scenes, with Woodley recalling she and Doherty had only met once before. But she applauded the directors for giving the pair “the space and the time” to explore the nuance in the first scene they filmed, when Annie and Link touch hands and hug. The hug unleashes an emotional reaction in Annie, letting down the walls of self-protection she had built up even before the crisis, matching Woodley and Doherty’s own vulnerabilities.
“Thomas and I … had an unspoken pact of just choosing to be very vulnerable with each other and very open with one another,” Woodley recalled. “It was so beautiful. I felt like we melted into who these characters were, by way of really believing this was the first time that we were connecting physically with another human after years and years of of distance.”
It was written in Fogelman’s script that Annie and Link sleep together, but there weren’t too many details, leaving Woodley, Doherty and the directors to fill in the blanks on the scene: “Do we see anything? Do we not see anything? Is it just instantly, post-coital? Is it during?”
“We decided that what makes it so beautiful is that there’s a tenderness and a slowness — it’s true intimacy, even more than having a sexual experience, it was a it was a moment of intimacy,” Woodley said, noting the pair also wanted to explore “the levity that can come from being with someone in such an intimate way, and the joy and the spike of endorphins that are rushing to both of these people’s heads.”
“Our goal was to make it beautiful, not sexy, and to make it feel cozy and warm and tender and not gratuitous,” Woodley said.
Despite those moments of levity, reality comes crashing in on Annie after that night, when she locks herself in the basement and refuses to face Link, breaking their promise for her to go with him on their quest to Colorado, where Link (rightfully) believes the underground bunker is. Why Annie doesn’t go with him is certainly a question top of mind for Woodley, who jokes “I definitely would have been there.”
“I think she doesn’t go with him because it would force her to be out of control again, and because she’d lost her mom, because she wasn’t able to get through med school, because she lost Gail, she really was accustomed to losing something when she didn’t have control over the situation, and being alone at Graceland fortified this idea, even if it was false, that she could control something,” Woodley said.
Should she have gone with Link, Annie would’ve had to relinquish her control, opening an opportunity for loss. “I think it was easier for her to stay comfortable and choose her loss than it was for her to get uncomfortable and have something be taken from her,” Woodley said.
Her connection with Link lives on, however, with Annie’s pregnancy revealed toward the end of the episode, a development that Woodley said gives her “something else to live for” and ignites her nature as caretaker and a nurturer.
“Everything from the moment she found out she was pregnant moving forward was about protecting that child, and creating a circumstance that would allow this child to thrive in a world that is built for destruction in her current moment,” Woodley said. “One of my favorite things, actually, is that she found her strength by way of this unborn kid … it just shows the power and the healing that can come from unconditional love.
“Paradise” Season 2 releases new episodes Mondays on Hulu.