Note: This story contains spoilers from “Paradise” Season 2, Episodes 1-3.
After working with Dan Fogelman for over a decade, Sterling K. Brown knows he loves to take a big swing, and the “Paradise” Season 2 opener is no exception.
Instead of immediately picking up on the result of Xavier’s (Sterling K. Brown) voyage to find his wife or the post-rebellion happenings in the underground bunker dubbed as paradise, the Season 2 premiere shifts to a new protagonist altogether in Shailene Woodley’s Annie, following her through the climate crisis and nuclear event that prompted her to hunker down in Graceland of all places, providing a new perspective on what political elites left behind when they descended into the bunker.
“By taking a big swing, you introduce people who we are unfamiliar with from Season 1, but knowing and trusting that the audience will get on board and ultimately know that there is a connection,” Brown told TheWrap. “Now we’re getting a chance to see what life was like for those who didn’t have access to money and planning … How did they make it through?”
Brown joked he wasn’t “mad” to take a break from the action — Xavier doesn’t appear until the final moments of Episode 1 — and applauded Woodley and Thomas Doherty for their “electric and beautiful” chemistry in that premiere episode. “It’s reminding you how isolated people have been from one another, and how unfamiliar we are with being in proximity and touch and intimacy, and not just sensual but connection — how important it is to us as human beings to be connected to one another,” Brown said.
It’s not until the end of the episode that viewers see Annie happen upon Xavier passed out in a field after crashing his plane on the way to Atlanta. By Episode 2, “Paradise” gives the whole picture of Xavier’s crashed plane and journey on the surface even before Annie finds him.
As Xavier experiences an environment foreign from the weather-controlled bunker he’s been living in for the past couple years, Brown’s own environment shifted from the pristine studio backlots used to create the “idyllic world of Paradise” to “out in the real world,” much like Xavier. “We’re out in the forest. I got poison oak within the first week, I had to take steroid shots to keep showing up to work,” Brown said.
Rather quickly, Xavier happens upon a group of abandoned children, who despite seemingly rather hopeless, provide a source of inspiration for Xavier, with Brown noting if “these children survived, my wife will have survived. I will have not have left the bunker in vain.” “There’s something about just the nature of children that inspires hope, even in the most direst of circumstances, children make you feel good,” Brown said.
Whereas Season 1 saw Xavier manage the politics of paradise and the death of Cal (James Marsden), he’s hyper-focused this season on finding Teri (Enuka Okuma), a mission that he attacks like a “dog with a bone.” “I have a North Star — I know exactly what I need to do, and I don’t care what gets in my way, I’m going to get to my wife,” Brown said of Xavier’s Season 2 goal.
Interwoven in Xavier’s experience on the surface are flashbacks to his first meeting with Teri as both of them had in-patient stays in the hospital, offering a chance for viewers to see what Brown calls “the flirtatious and funny side of Xavier” through their meet cute. “He’s usually so severe and stoic, I love those colors,” he said.
“It was fun to see her deny me and invite me at the same time with either a glance or smile,” Brown said of Xavier and Teri’s playful interactions, including when she hits him with a Jell-O package or said she’s not about to let “the hot guy derail her whole life plan.” “But I am hot, so that means something,” Brown said.
Through their flirtatious, and later more tender interactions, Brown hopes viewers see there’s a part of Xavier that’s only accessed by his wife, “The way that he is with the rest of the world is different than the way that he is with his with the woman of his dreams.”
“Everybody needs somebody to pull them outside of themselves and just show them a different color — that’s the great tragedy of the beginning of Season 1 is that this is a man who doesn’t think he is worthy of living, like he sort of stopped because his wife is not with him,” Brown said. “So to know that this person exists, and this person is able to affect him in this beautiful way, I think the audience understands this person’s importance in his life is of the highest because of how he is with her.”
“Paradise” Season 2 releases new episodes Mondays on Hulu.
