EXCLUSIVE: Home Before Dark’s Dana Fox Talks Shooting Season Two During the Pandemic
Home Before Dark creator, Dana Fox sat down with BB to talk about the highly anticipated second season of her hit AppleTV+ show. The new season is projected to premiere on the streaming platform on June 11.
During our chat, Fox talked what was to come for Hilde this season, shooting during the pandemic, having to adjust the script when the cast returned after taking a break due to the pandemic and so much more.
Can you tell me a little bit how you decided to shape the second season?
“I think for us, the challenge was people seem to really love the first season, and the cliffhanger in particular, and really want to know what happened with that. I was so excited that we were going to talk to them about that and that people are going to get a really juicy, satisfying series of answers about some of the truth of what happened.
But we also wanted to make sure that we opened up the series and that we sort of showed people that there are more mysteries in this town. This town has a lot of secrets, and everyone has secrets. I wanted the show to be able to grow up with Hilde and Brooklynn [Prince] is so extraordinary on the show. She’s just so incredible to watch. And I wanted to make sure we didn’t try to keep her a little kid at all.”
How did you make sure to show she wasn’t a little kid any more?
“I was interested in sort of exploring her development as a person through the mystery in the show. It was sort of about what can we put her through this season that is going to be emotional the same way that it was in season one. While also finding a way that is going to feel like a very bingy, delicious, plot-turny mystery for season two. And I think we achieved that. I’m excited. It was hard, but I think we did it.”
“I think for us, what was so great to see in season two was that everybody on the show rose to the occasion. All of the actors brought their A games and were ready for the challenges. They wanted to explore more about their own characters. It was really satisfying to be able to still firmly ground the show in Hilde’s perspective, but to be able to go off and experience her at own home. For example, with her father and her family, and sort of see these other characters, their lives outside of Hilde. To let her sister Izzy, who is the teenager who was always in her sister’s shadow kind of step out of that shadow and be able to find her own voice was really satisfying. I think for me, I’m always going to be interested in telling the story.”
You can read the rest of our interview below the jump. Make sure to check out our review of the second season when it is released tomorrow, June 11.
Photo credit: AppleTV+
Was there anything developed for Hilde this season that didn’t make it in that if we get a season three, hopefully, you definitely want to touch upon?
“Fingers crossed, but I think what’s so interesting about it is that it’s a character based mystery. So it’s a mystery where you care about what the stories are because you care about the people so much and you care about the way the mystery is impacting their lives. I can’t imagine ever sort of running out of gas on that because I feel Hilde as a character is just really an inspiration. We want to write for her until the end of time, if we, if we’re lucky enough to.”
You ended up having to take a break in the middle of shooting the season because of the pandemic, was it hard trying to get everyone back and focused when you returned?
“We were really lucky that our cast is so great and they love each other so much, they’re such a family. And honestly, they were so excited to get back to work. We all were. We all felt what I think a lot of Americans and a lot of people around the world felt, which is that you don’t really know how much you love something until it’s taken away from you.
I think that a lot of people couldn’t work during that time period. A lot of people still can’t work in person. And we just felt we couldn’t believe that we were lucky enough to be able to follow these very strict medical protocols, to make sure everybody was absolutely safe, but were able to actually start up again. We were able to come back and when we did it was just so joyous to see each other again. It wasn’t like, ‘Okay guys focus!’
What was the biggest obstacle you faced when you did return?
“The only thing that was pretty funny was that we have kids on the show and they aged. It’s like everybody who has a kid knows that six months in a kid’s life is, you can see the difference. I’m hoping we buried it in the editing and you can’t quite tell when it occurred, but there’s definitely a moment you’re like, ‘Oh, look at Hilde the baby. Oh, nope! She’s an adult.’ Lines that we had written before the shutdown actually sounded sort of weird coming out of her mouth after the shutdown. So, we ended up having to change a few lines because she actually had changed enough in between the two that it was noticeable.
How much input did Brooklynn have on crafting Hilde this season?
“I believe in good actors and we have so many of them on this show. I believe that if you let them do their thing and you incentivize them to do their best work, you will always get the best performance. So I like to change the part around the actor. We always want to grow with Brooklynn. We always want Brooklyn to feel challenged and she has such opinions about everything. It was amazing. She’s brilliant. She has really smart ideas about the character. She’s awesome.”
What was the most difficult part of making this season?
“I have a slight learning disability which I discovered like a year or two ago where I’m maybe dyslexic. Reading has always been really hard for me and I didn’t realize that I had done all these crazy things to compensate for that. I would always listen to my scripts out loud on this voice stream app and I would picture them as a movie in my head as I was doing it. It helped me see the stuff in my brain
I always really struggled to keep everything straight. And I was lucky enough to have amazing other writers on the show who are really incredible at that. I would always be calling people out, being like, ‘Okay, in this moment, has that happened yet? Does Hilde know this yet? Do we know this yet?’ And everybody would be like, ‘No, no, no, that happens in the next episode. Nobody knows that yet.’
Was it hard to balance all the character stories this season, because touching on all of them had to be hard?
So, that was sort of how I had to struggle to deal with my own particular shortcomings. But in terms of all the other characters, I have to say it’s never hard to juggle great actors in these parts because you kind of excited to go to them whenever you go to them you’re excited to see what they have to do next. So it’s been really a challenge, but also really fun to kind of write to all the other characters. And I think you feel that the world is real because everybody feels they have a house or that you could imagine what their house is. If you didn’t see it, you feel you really get to know everybody, which is what it feels like when you live in a small town. Yeah.