Daveed Diggs & Rafael Casal On How ‘Blindspotting’ Season 2 Finds Miles’ Family Overwhelmed By The Prison Industrial Complex
SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the first two episodes of Blindspotting Season 2 on Starz.
It’s been nine months since Miles (Rafael Casal) and Ashley (Jasmine Cephas-Jones) exchanged their prison nuptials in the Season 1 finale of Blindspotting, and it hasn’t gotten any easier to navigate life without him.
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The Season 2 premiere of the Starz series finds Ashley anxiously trying to execute the perfect birthday party for their son Sean. He’s turning seven, and it’s the first birthday he’s celebrating without his dad. But, there’s a beacon of hope, as Ashley and Sean’s first weekend visitation with Miles is approaching. Everyone keeps telling Ashley she should be happy, so why is she miserable?
“No one is ever happy when they’re telling you how happy you should be,” Casal, who also executive produces the series with Daveed Diggs and serves as showrunner, told Deadline.
Matters are only made worse when her mother-in-law Rainey (Helen Hunt) asks if she might be able to take Ashley’s place at the second weekend visitation to see her son. The idea that Miles’ family could even spend the weekend with him is a privilege that most inmates and their families across the United States don’t have. But, as Casal explained, it presents its own set of challenges, because “a prison system designing a machination for families to stay together is fundamentally going to be flawed.”
While Season 1 tacked the immediate aftermath of Miles going to prison, Season 2 aims to focus on how this family is going to weather through the long haul of his five year sentence at San Quentin.
Casal and Diggs spoke with Deadline about crafting Season 2 with that in mind, as well as how they shaped the story around the outstanding Season 1 performances from their cast.
DEADLINE: Did any of the actors’ performances or embodiments of these characters in Season 1 inform the way that you wrote Season 2?
RAFAEL CASAL: Yeah, absolutely. Ben Turner [who plays Earl] we’ve known for years, but we’d never seen him act on screen before. So that was a learning experience of where he really thrives and excels. And, Helen [Hunt], obviously, we’ve seen her in a million things, but we’ve never seen her in this context. So how she played Rainey fundamentally changed everything on the page. And then Jaylen [Barron, who plays Trish] was an audition. So we’d never even been in the room with her until she was doing the show. We didn’t realize how funny she was. Once you get everyone together, you really see where the strength and the character dynamics are. So you’ve got this plan for Season 1 and these character dynamics you’re going to set up and then some of those are there and other things also start to appear that you’re like, ‘Oh, man, this interplay is really funny. And these two characters are really interesting together.’ You enter the room for Season 2 and you go, ‘We didn’t get every drop of brilliance out of this dynamic.’ And so then we dial that up. Just being unafraid to let the show kind of teach us what it is a bit.
DAVEED DIGGS: Television is the only place where this relationship between actor and writer exists. It’s my favorite thing about it, actually, is that because you’re sort of still creating as you’re filming in a lot of cases — and even if the scripts are done, you can still rewrite everything. Everything’s always happening. You get to watch somebody do something and react to that as a writer. That character didn’t do that in my brain, but that actor made that a reality and now it is canon for the show, which means we have that forever now. It’s really very exciting. That’s the most exciting thing about television.
DEADLINE: As you were talking about that, were there any specific moments you thought of?
CASAL: Season 2, I think overall, we just let Jaylen off the chain. She’s so funny all the time. She’s just got five jokes in the chamber. You can do less trying to write the perfect joke for her and more just give her the circumstance and then give her permission to go. I think Ben, who was a writer on the show, also just giving him more creative freedom in the room Season 2. because we knew if we put him on that path what was going to come up. There’s some great moments with Candace [Nicholas-Lippman, who plays Janelle] and her physicality that she’s wanted to mess with for a long time that came out in Season 2. We saw that she was doing all of this training and stuff outside of the show. We were like, ‘Oh, we got to use that.’ I think Daveed and I both really like to lean into where people’s natural inclinations are. You see that people are firing on all cylinders when they’re in their element. Part of Season 1 was just getting to know these people. But there’s a Western episode in Season 2, that’s episode six. And Jaylen had done all this horseback riding on Free Rein on Netflix and she knows how to ride. We’re trying to figure out which characters we’re gonna get on horses and do stunts, it was like, well, we have a person who knows how to do that already. So just things like that. You get to know people and you understand where their natural abilities shine.
DIGGS: Jasmine’s a big, big fan of The Muppets so we incorporated an imaginary friend into this season. [Laughs]
DEADLINE: It seems like Season 1 was more about how these characters dealt with the immediate aftermath of Miles going to prison. This season, they’re in it for the long haul, which puts them under a different kind of duress.
DIGGS: That was exactly it. The intention of jumping forward nine months was to get to that kind of stasis and to get to explore this other aspect of this relationship of community and the prison industrial complex. That was exactly the design of the season. We established that we are going to stay together. This is not going to break us up. This is a story about a family who’s persevering through this, so let’s get into the middle of that. Let’s not just pick up where we left off. Let’s see, what are the struggles a year? Where it’s not new anymore. Like, this is your normal. So what was that like?
DEADLINE: I’m thinking specifically of that conversation between Rainey and Ashley about whether Rainey can do a weekend visitation with Miles. It’s a debate they could have over and over again — I’m his wife vs. I’m his mother. How do you find a consensus on that?
CASAL: Who knows if you ever do.
DIGGS: In any relationship.
CASAL: Also, not with prison as the focal point, that’s also just like mother/daughter-in-law sh*t. But I think it is intensified with this finite amount of time, and the notion of family and who is family and when is family? Who gets this exclusivity? A prison system designing a machination for families to stay together is fundamentally going to be flawed. Right now, San Quentin [where Miles is in prison] has a program where every three months you can apply to do a weekend visit with your family. That is an inherently sweet program that doesn’t exist in many other places. It is more liberal than most prisons in the country. However, even just by presenting that option, you present a number of new problems. Which inmates get this privilege? Is family a privilege or is it a necessity for rehabilitation? Who gets to go? For how long? What impact is this going to have on the people that get to go? Let’s say it wasn’t Ashley, and somebody had met someone for a year and then they got married and this has been your mom forever. Should it be the new wife [who gets visitation]? It presents a number of family tensions. And that’s before we even get into like, when does Trish get to go? Does he ever get time just alone with his son? Should everyone go? Should they trade off? This is the dilemma of families that are subjected to this when somebody goes to prison. Is there actually a just way to go through this? Or is it just about negotiating the levels of how unjust all of it is, and just trying to figure out if there’s any order that you can make to it? So starting the season with that conversation felt like the smartest place for us to begin, which is like, ‘Hey, there’s some hope and hope has presented another set of problems.’ That felt like a good inciting incident for Season 2. Also this idea that Ashley is supposedly going to be happy about this visit but she’s miserable the whole first episode. She’s been waiting nine months for this, and now she’s doing a birthday and everyone’s telling her how happy she should be. No one is ever happy when they’re telling you how happy you should be.
DEADLINE: How do you determine the right moment for a bit more surrealism, whether that’s a dance sequence, or Ashley’s spoken word in the first episode? Or even Earl’s rap at the end of Season 1?
CASAL: We have rules for all the conventions of when they happen or when they don’t. Obviously, Daveed and I have this deep love for heightened language and verse because we both have backgrounds in music and poetry. And so for us, or at least I would say for me, my role for poetry is that when Ashley addresses the camera in verse, I always think of it as these are letters to Sean when he’s older to explain what was going on when he was too young to understand — and her way of justifying her choices. The reason she addresses the audience is that she’s sort of also addressing an older Sean, being like ‘This is why I am the way that I am. This is why I made the choices I made.’ So verse really plays in those moments, and then that extends out to Rainey and Earl, in these moments where no one is understanding what they’re going through but they want the audience to know their choice is just or their thought process is just. When we’re talking about a justice system, this is their appeal to the court of public opinion. And then movement is always, when the weight of the prison industrial complex is too heavy for words, movement comes in. That’s the beautiful thing about dance. Dance is this expression of a feeling without the crutch of language. When the show needs that because it’s too big or it’s too much to articulate in a 30 minute episode, we’ve moved into dancing…. Diggs, do you want to talk about trial and error?
DIGGS: That’s just making art. We’ve had a number of occasions where we would put one of these moments in and, I mean, the most common thing in TV is time. So you have your dancers choreograph an insanely complicated dance, totally gorgeous and beautiful and then you get in the edit and you’re like, ‘Yeah, this episode is 47 minutes long. No way. Let’s chop this down music video style.’ There’s no way to predict that. I mean, you’d think there would be. I think we’ve done it enough by now to just be able to look at a thing and be like, ‘That’s not gonna work.’ But it often slips by.
CASAL: Sometimes also, it’s just not needed. You think that this is going to be a feeling that needs to be expressed. And then this great single shot of somebody not speaking and like the convention of television also sometimes just works traditionally. You sit on somebody’s face. You know what they’re thinking. They don’t need to say anything. So sometimes it’s about less. Sometimes we plan a dance sequence for months. And then we get there on the day and we’re like, ‘There’s just no way this day finishes. Not without being a 14 hour day. Let’s get rid of this dance scene.’ We sit there as executive producers and we go ‘Does it make or break the episode’? The story is everything. Our job as creators of the show is the spine of the show. Is the thing we set out to do coming across? And sometimes it’d be really cool to have a dance sequence but cool alone is not enough to make the cut.
DIGGS: It’s been a steep learning curve to get to that point in my life.
CASAL: The problem is that we also say, ‘Shoot the cool man.’ [Laughs]
DEADLINE: I love hearing you speak about those references in the show that only people from Oakland will understand. What are some of those moments in Season 2?
DIGGS: Oh, man, there’s a ton. I mean, the train that Sean rides on is like a thing we all grew up going to at Tilden Park in Berkeley. Our days to shoot in the bay are so precious. They’re not many of them. After learning that through Season 1, we were like, ‘Well, what can we really do with Season 2 that really grounds this specific place? What’s something you could only get here?’ So that was one of those, for me.
CASAL: Luka’s Lounge was huge. We kept it open for two months so we could shoot the exteriors there. Sometimes it’s the double down on the localness. It’s not just that we shot at Luka’s Lounge, but it’s that when we shot the interior set in LA, we made sure there was a projection of the logo of an event we used to go to there called Fresh Steps. When we shot the exterior, the guy working the door is the guy who used to run Fresh Steps. We go down to the 10 people who are going to understand this. There’s a great shot at the end of the series where a bike club comes through a shot, and it’s the Iron Souls from Oakland. Sometimes it’s the song that’s playing in the background, it’s the extra that’s walking by, it’s deciding to do the shot in front of this store instead of another store. I think everything we do runs through this filter of what would it be at home, even if no one will believe it? What would actually happen? That happens when we’re actually shooting in the Bay. And then when we’re on set in LA, it’s like twice as heavy. Because we know we’re not in the Bay. We know that we’re in a warehouse. So we’re going to double and triple down on everything, even if it’s just for Daveed and I.
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