The finale of Apple TV+’s “Shining Girls” was a fitting ending for a tense, traumatic season as we watched Kirby (Elisabeth Moss) turn the tables on Harper (Jamie Bell), the time traveler who had so brutally assaulted her years before.
But is it really an ending? Despite the limited series finishing in roughly the same place where the novel by Lauren Beukes did, Moss isn’t convinced this is where the the story should stop.
“Personally speaking, just honestly, I feel like there’s more story to tell,” she tells TheWrap of the series, which was created and run by Silka Luisa. “I think that sometimes with the first season, you’ve just given everybody a lay of the land. And then in the second season, you get to actually get down to business and have some fun. So I would be interested in ‘where do we go now’ and not having to explain the world, but getting to go deeper into it.”
Moss, who is also an executive producer on the series and directed two episodes, even questions whether the ending is a happy one: “I’m not so sure that it is. There is an element of victory. But there’s a complication which is, ‘What the hell do I do now?’ I think that was really interesting to me to have this character who was like, ‘I did it. I did what I was supposed to do, I took charge of my life. Now, what do I do?”
Moss says there have definitely been discussions about a second season, “It’s not like nobody talks about it, right? Anytime anything goes well, everyone’s like, ‘Should we do it again?’ [But] there are many people that have to make that decision, as you know, and the big conversation and all of that. So, actually, honestly, I don’t know right now.”
The Emmy winner is currently busy filming Season 5 of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but says she’s “technically available” to return for more “Shining Girls.”
“Even if we did a Season 2, they have to write it and we’d have to prep it and blah, blah, blah. So yeah, I don’t know. Okay. Technically, I’m available,” she says.
One thing she would love to see more of is the relationship between journalist Dan Velasquez (Wagner Moura), the one person who believed her incredible story about time shifting around her, but doesn’t survive to see her triumph over Harper. As things are left in the finale, when Kirby goes back a few years and finds Dan at a bar, he doesn’t remember her.
“I think my favorite scene of the season is that one in the bar with him,” she shares. “It’s just so incredibly romantic and tragic. You know this person and they don’t remember you anymore, and then oh, maybe they do. There’s something that’s jogging their memory. That’s such an interesting and romantic idea. That scene was so fun to do. I loved it.”
Moss also reveals she kept a page from the notebook that Dan always carries: “I still have the piece of paper that she writes on and leaves with him. I have it. So only Wag and I know what’s on that piece of paper.”
“Shining Girls” is streaming on Apple TV+.
