Both Amanda Schull and Barbara Sukowa say they’re always pleasantly surprised every week when a new script for Syfy’s 12 Monkeys arrives. Schull and Sukowa were part of the 12 Monkeys cast who made the trek to San Diego for the 2015 Comic Con and in addition to participating in a panel with fans of the science-fiction drama, they also sat down for roundtable interviews to further explore the upcoming second season of the series.
“It’s a real gift to be on a show when you don’t even know as an actor when you’ll be, where you’ll be, and who you’ll get to play off of from one week to the next. I mean, I hit the serious jackpot with this job, and I am very well aware of it,” said Schull.
Neither Schull nor Sukowa weren’t allowed to get too descriptive about the new season, and keeping the show’s secrets was made a little easier by the fact that season two hadn’t started shooting at the time of our interview. “I don’t know that much myself that I could reveal,” explained Sukowa. “I’ve read a few of the episodes. What I can reveal is that it will delve more into the characters. The first season was a lot of plot, a lot of establishing that world. And this time it’s just a lot about the relations of people. And, time travel is going to get really wild.”
“It’s good…it’s really good. We’ve gotten the first three – I got the fourth last night but I wasn’t able to read it. I conked out. But, Cassie has a very different journey ahead of her and it’s going to be really exciting from my perspective,” said Schull about the season two scripts. “I mean, everyone has a great and interesting journey ahead of them, but from my character’s perspective I get to be the same bones of the person that I developed over the course of the episodes that I developed last season. But, I get to take her down a completely different road and that is going to be really exciting to travel her down and encounter situations that she didn’t have to deal with last season.”
Fans are interested in what’s going to happen to the romance between Cassie and James, but Schull points out they never actually had a love scene in season one. “You know what’s so funny is that people really think that they had this big love affair. We never had a love scene. We never had a romance of any sort,” said Schull. “Aaron [Stanford] and I went to France and did some press and one of the interviewers was like, ‘Oh, you know Cassie, she has all these men in her life…’ I was like, ‘She had two, dude. What are you talking about?’ And he was like, ‘No. Cole!’ They never had a love scene. They never had a real romance. It was all implied. I think part of it that comes across is that it was a relationship that’s so unique to anything else that probably is on television from my perspective. But also they need each other in a way that is really desperate and resentful at the same time. It’s really special.”
Sukowa’s Jones has become one of the most intriguing characters on the show, and thankfully the initial plans for the character were changed. “At the beginning my role was only planned to be three episodes,” revealed Sukowa. “To have a complex role for a woman my age it’s not so widespread. It’s a good thing that she’s a female leader, has power. We’re going to see probably a little more vulnerability next season. I have really fun playing that part.”
Watch the full interviews for more details on what to expect from season 2 of 12 Monkeys:
