Season 2 of HBO’s Big Little Lies is slated to premiere on June 9, and fans of the drama series can’t wait to see what the second installment has in store.
The cable network released a trailer for the show on April 14, and it features none other than Meryl Streep, who will play Perry’s mother, Mary Louise Wright. “My son is dead,” Streep tells Madeline in the trailer. “I want to know what happened that night. I’m very tempted to ask you, but I don’t think I would get the truth, would I?”
We also see the show’s main stars- Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern and Shailene Woodley- as targets of unending town gossip. “We’re kidding ourselves if we think people will stop talking,” Nicole Kidman’s character, Celeste, tells the others. “It’s going to get us. It’s going to get us all,” Bonnie later tells Madeline.
In a recent interview with Variety, Executive Producer David E. Kelley said of the way season one ended, “We really didn’t close the chapter. It ended on a very open note of what’s going to happen next, and that’s will the lie have a life, will it have a malignancy?”
Witherspoon also shared that the author of the book on which the show is based, Liane Moriarty, returned to write a novella as a sort of template for the impending season. Kidman shares, “It’s being able to delve more deeply into these women. What’s been the incredible virtue of the series but also the incredibly difficult thing we’ve had to navigate is you don’t get [to explore] six women in [a television show] and follow their lives in these complicated ways.”
This season, Celeste will experience the aftermath of abuse with a deceased partner, while Jane will do her best to take steps forward in the face of her own traumatic experiences.
And what about Meryl Streep’s character? Variety quotes the actress as saying, “I’m playing someone who is dealing with whatever the deficits of what her parenting was and the mysteries in that and how you can’t go back in time and fix something. All of those issues, that was interesting to me, and it felt real, honest… David really understood that part, and I felt like I had something to give to this piece,” she said.
Will there be a third season of Big Little Lies? Kelley would argue no. Whereas they didn’t want to close the chapter on the show when the first season ended, this time, Kelley explains, they “like where our closure is at the end of Season 2, so this will probably be it.”
Be sure to tune into the season 2 premiere of Big Little Lies June 9 on HBO.