This article contains some spoilers for Season 1.

What happens when you wake up from a coma and have no recollection of who you are, let alone the people who are supposedly closest to you? Who do you trust when vague “memories” don’t line up with what you’re being told?

We may have seen it before with characters such as Jason Bourne or Leonard Shelby, but Surface’s Sophie presents a new and layered take on the amnesiac protagonist. Played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the character’s questions surrounding her past – and present – seemingly never end.

In Season 1, she is told she attempted suicide and is now being closely monitored by her husband James (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), best friend Caroline (Ari Graynor) and Thomas, a mysterious man who lurks in the shadows and claims to be the police officer assigned to her case (Stephan James). As she attempts to put the pieces of her life in San Francisco together, she soon learns she has an even more curious past in London.

Which brings us to Season 2. Full of new characters to side-eye and puzzles to solve, this second chapter is dynamic and drastically ramped up from the first. Created by showrunner Veronica West and executive produced by West, Lauren Neustadter (President of Film & TV at Hello Sunshine) and Reese Witherspoon, as well as Mbatha-Raw, Surface is an engaging female-driven series that turns classic character tropes on their head and is able to shift between genres without missing a beat. I spoke with West and Neustadter about the second season and where the show is taking its audience in terms of both story and character.

Season 1 and Season 2 of Surface are extremely different from each other, not only in their supporting characters but also in terms of setting and tone. Tell me about what you wanted to accomplish with each season and how they trace Sophie’s character arc.

Veronica: Season 1 is about someone who wakes up in a whole new world. Sophie’s lost all her memory and she wakes up in this perfect house with this perfect husband. It’s really an intimate study of dismantling the lies she’s been told. It’s about her dysfunctional marriage and her romantic relationships and her friendships… and about who she was.

Veronica West

But what she learns in Season 1 is that she was not always the hero of her own story. She’s done some pretty shady things and I think what plagues her, what torments her and keeps her up at night, is why. Why was status so important to her? Why was money so important? Why did she not tell anyone about her past or about her mother? Why did she cross an ocean to run away from her past?

As we launched into Season 2, we wanted to answer all of those questions and really lean into the thriller energy of the show – let Sophie take control of the story. She’s really showing up here, going undercover in her own past, and that lends the show naturally to be more of a spy thriller, a Bourne Identity kind of vibe. She’s in a lot more danger in Season 2, and you can feel that in every episode.

Lauren: I think her character never could have imagined how dangerous it would become to understand the truth – but I love her, and I think the audience loves her, because she’s always in pursuit of the truth. Whatever she’s doing, there’s a reason for it. Even when she’s being bad, you understand why.

As a writer, what was it like to take on this somewhat unique type of main character who starts off with a completely blank state – no memories of her past or understanding of her present?

Veronica: There’s a rush of information coming at her that she’s synthesizing. And we, as an audience, are as well. But then there are also these things about her that are immutable. The way she moves, the way that she looks in the mirror and moves her hair. There are these things that are intrinsically her. That’s the question that Gugu and I were so intrigued by – who is the real Sophie? Is it nature versus nurture? Is she going to turn into the same person who she was in the past? Or is this really, like you’re saying, a clean slate and she gets to determine her own destiny?

How involved was Gugu in developing her character through both seasons?

Lauren: Gugu has been the most unbelievable partner from the very beginning. I read the pilot script, we worked on it a little bit together, and then the first stop was Gugu. Reese and I really knew this should be her show and we felt so excited that she read it quickly and came back and said, “I love it, I’m in.” From that moment, we really found ourselves immersed in conversation with her. It’s such a privilege to get to work with an actress who is so invested, so smart and so thoughtful, and who really connects on a soul level to the character.

There’s so much that we talked about and so much that Veronica and our amazing writers room gave to the character. But there was equally so much that Gugu gave us. She’d ask, “Did you think about this? And what about this? And wouldn’t it be interesting if…” I think it’s the ultimate privilege to be able to develop a dimensional character in conjunction with an actor who feels deeply invested and is really thoughtful. Gugu is all of those things.

Tell me about James and Sophie’s relationship. Is it toxic? Is it true love?

Lauren: I think it’s both! It’s so interesting because it’s not consistent. I think that the love that they feel for each other is constant, but there are so many complicating factors and there are so many cards that turn over that the relationship evolves and it shifts in ways the audience doesn’t expect it to. I think that because they care so much about each other, when something happens that feels complicated, it either hurts or it makes them care about each other even more. Their relationship is really layered. I think it’s really singular and just incredibly compelling for an audience to watch.

Veronica: I love it when people have different opinions about the characters in a show, and who they’re rooting for someone to be with. To me, that’s great drama – when you can debate it with your friend and say, “I think they should break up” or “I think they should stay together.” That’s what makes it exciting to me.

For much of each season, the audience doesn’t know who to trust. Tell me about developing a whole cast of morally ambiguous characters and maintaining that feeling of suspense.

Veronica: I never set out to write a character that is completely good or completely evil. I think that’s true to how people are. We all do terrible things and we all are coming from a good place at the end of the day, for the most part. So I think that as long as you understand where the characters are coming from, they can get away with a lot. They can hurt people and you still love them.

Lauren: With Quinn (Phil Dunster) for example, I think that you find yourself wondering, “If this character had been born into a different family, how would he have behaved? Would he have made the same choices?” All of these characters are very complicated in really delicious, interesting ways. I think that that’s one of the things that fans of the show appreciated in Season 1, and we double down on it in Season 2 with this incredible cast.

Identity is obviously a major theme you explore in the series. What are some others?

Veronica: For me, the core theme of Surface is this idea of the Sophie in the present – the one we’re on board with, the one we’re watching – and the Sophie that she was in the past. And the question of whether she was destined to end up this way. Is she going to repeat the same mistakes? We do that in a romantic love triangle way in Season 1, and now in Season 2, as she discovers where she came from, it really starts to explain her behavior in the past that seemed more on the villainous side. The question that’s really interesting to me is, “As she starts to learn these bad things again, is she going to turn into that person again?” Is it in her nature? Or is it nurture?

The cities – San Francisco in Season 1 and London in Season 2 – almost seem like characters in and of themselves. What role does each play in the story?

Lauren: Each of the cities plays a huge role and I think it also helps to set the tone – the first season felt very moody, it was really like a mystery and a drama. And then you come to London in Season 2 and all of a sudden, things shift into a different gear. They’re moving faster and there’s a whole other world that feels bigger than our characters. It’s a very full throttle, almost thriller season, and that was our intention from the outset. But we knew that thrusting these characters into a city like London would force us to create the propulsive narrative that had always been the intention. It was an exciting thing to see it all come to life. 

Veronica: We also had unbelievable access and were able to shoot in some of the most stunning historic locations, harnessing the energy of the city. I was shocked at what they let us do!

So would you say the genre has changed from Season 1 to Season 2? Where do you go from here?

Lauren: Absolutely. We were a slow burn mystery in the first season and I think audiences absolutely loved learning about Sophie. We realized we had an opportunity to really put our foot on the accelerator in the second season, and we were very intentional from the outset about doing that. After Season 1, we had a great conversation with our partners at Apple TV+ and we said, “we have an opportunity to really go for it”. We did exactly that and the cast we got is really a reflection of the incredible writing and the rich character work that exists inside of the season.

It’s too soon to tell about a third season, but what I can say is that a job we’re always very aware of is making sure that we end every season in a way that feels incredibly satisfying for our audience, but also opens the door to what might come next. I think Veronica and the team on the show did an incredible job and obviously, as always, we hope we get to continue to tell this story and be with these characters.

Lauren Neustadter. Photo by Monica Orozco

Lauren, tell me about Hello Sunshine. What do you look for in the projects that come across your desk and what was it about Surface that stood out to you?

Lauren: Everything we do at Hello Sunshine centers on a woman, and we hope that, in an unconventional way, we can showcase that woman as the hero of her own story. When I read Veronica’s spec pilot for this, I instantly felt like it was a perfect show for Hello Sunshine, because Sophie is this wildly complicated, interesting female character. I also think she is inspired by a lot of characters played by men, and it’s very rare to see a woman in this situation. If you think about The Bourne Identity, if you think about Memento, you’ve seen men really sink their teeth into these kinds of complex characters on a quest for answers.

But I do think it’s rare to get to see a woman doing that, and upon reading the pilot script, Reese and I had that conversation about “This is the kind of story we’re very excited to tell.” We always try to put women in situations that we’ve not seen them in before, and this was an original spec pilot, entirely new, that came from Veronica’s beautiful brain. It’s just been a privilege to go on this journey of seeing where these characters go and the adventure that they’re on. And having Gugu as Sophie at the center of the story was something that made it very clear that it was perfect for Hello Sunshine.

[More: Lauren Neustadter On Changing The Narrative For Females]

Veronica: What I loved about our partnership and working with Hello Sunshine on this story is that it wasn’t the idea of just dropping a woman into The Bourne Identity and telling the same kind of story. This show is distinctly feminine. It deals with life through her point of view and the way that she evolves, and is about her relationships and her marriage. It all feels like the story we haven’t been able to tell before, and that’s why it’s so valuable to have a production company like this on your side.