‘Twisted Metal’ Season 2 Trailer Reveals the First Look at the Villainous Calypso
Twisted Metal is back — at least on TV. While the beloved PlayStation-era game franchise has remained dormant since its last entry in 2012, the vehicular carnage returns this summer in season two of Peacock’s live-action adaptation.
The first teaser for Twisted Metal’s second season has arrived, providing a first look at the bigger scope and new cast members for the action-comedy series.
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The trailer begins with a quick recap of the events of season one narrated by the new Captain America himself, Anthony Mackie, who plays John Doe, an amnesiac delivery driver (called a “milkman”) who gets caught up in a vicious car-based battle tournament in hopes of recovering the secrets of his past. Also returning are Quiet (Stephanie Beatriz), a drifter and paramour to Doe, and the series’ most recognizable character, the serial killer clown Sweet Tooth (played by Joe Seanoa and voiced by Will Arnett).
A rapid-fire montage shows off a string of new characters all pulled directly from the game, including clear looks at masked drivers like Dollface (who’s teased in the press release as being Doe’s long-lost sister) and fan-favorite Mr. Grimm, a sickle-wielding biker who was a staple of the games across many iterations. Other characters, mostly identifiable by their individual vehicles from the games, look to include Vermin, Junkyard Dog, and most ridiculously, Axel — a man whose arms are literally bound between two giant wheels.
But the biggest reveal is that of the series’ big bad, Calypso, who is played by Anthony Carrigan, a breakout favorite of HBO’s Barry for his role as NoHo Hank. Here, he’s seen with a full head of shoulder-length hair and a suit of an ominous black and red hue. As in the games, the shows’ version of Calypso is the organizer of the Twisted Metal tournament, wherein competitors fight to the death to have their one true wish granted.
In Season One, Calypso was only hinted at as the person pulling the strings behind the plot, which mostly served as a 10-part build up to the tournament at the heart of the games. Like 2021’s Mortal Kombat movie, which also omitted the actual tournament at the core of the source material, the first batch of Twisted Metal’s episodes drifted away from the premise of the games, instead setting up a Mad Max-like post-apocalyptic world where society fell apart in the Nineties. The teaser appears to show the series’ deeper commitment to the tenets that made Twisted Metal so popular.
From Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and showrunner Michael Jonathan Smith (Cobra Kai), the show is a juvenile bloodbath with bits of mysticism, as Calypso genuinely has the power to grant wishes. Although, in a monkey’s paw twist, most of the outcomes tend to end badly for each contestant.
Although fans have been hoping for another entry for years, the video game franchise has been mostly dead since 2012’s Twisted Metal for the PlayStation 3. For years, rumors circulated that Sony had been working on a live-service multiplayer version of the game, but it was reportedly cancelled in 2024 during a slew of company layoffs.
For the time being, Peacock’s live action take on Twisted Metal is the only thing keeping the series alive, but the hope is still alive for star Anthony Mackie, who told Rolling Stone in 2023 that he’d love for the show to provide a springboard for the game’s revival — something he’d like to star in himself. “I loved Twisted Metal growing up,” he said. “[The show] is kind of like an evolution of the game in a way that I feel gives it a perfect second life.”
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