[Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Season 2 of Locke & Key.]
From co-showrunners Carlton Cuse and Meredith Averill and adapted from the best-selling comic book series by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, the second season of the Netflix original series Locke & Key finds the three Locke siblings – Tyler (Connor Jessup), Kinsey (Emilia Jones) and Bode (Jackson Robert Scott) – navigating life as keepers of the keys that were hidden throughout their ancestral home, Keyhouse. As they continue to test the power unique to each key, they also learn that they might not have completely shaken the demons that they thought they had defeated.
During a virtual press junket for Season 2, Collider got the opportunity to chat with Cuse and Averill about their goal of making the new season better than the last, going deeper into the characters and the mythology, their process for figuring out what story points they wanted to explore, what they learned from the first season that they carried over to the second season, their personal favorite visual moments, and how Season 3 (which they’ve already shot) will compare.
Collider: The first season came out in early 2020, and now the second season is out in late 2021, so it’s been quite a bit of time that fans have been waiting for the show to return. What are you most excited about fans getting to see with Season 2?
CARLTON CUSE: (Co-showrunner) Meredith [Averill] and I set out to make Season 2 better than Season 1, and we believe we succeeded. We hope that you feel we succeeded. It’s a little darker and it’s a little more mature. We tried to go deeper, in a lot of ways. We went deeper into the characters, deeper into the mythology, deeper into the jeopardy, and deeper into the manipulations that are part of the conflict between our characters and these demons that unwittingly have been unleashed. We’re just excited to have the audience finally see it. We obviously had to go through COVID and it took us awhile to resume shooting and get everything done and made. It’s so exciting that we’re finally at the point where it’s coming out. That’s super thrilling to us.
Did you have set points that you wanted to hit? When you started out figuring out what the season was, were there certain keys you wanted to explore and were there certain big moments you knew you had to have, or is it less specific than that?
MEREDITH AVERILL: Carlton and I always start each season just talking amongst ourselves about what the themes of the season are, what the stories are that we naturally set up at the end of last season that we really wanna pay off, and what some stories are from within the comics that we’re most excited about trying to include in the season, and then what we want to see our characters tackle and what journeys we wanna see them go on. Early on, a big idea that we wanted to tackle right away was, how and when is Kinsey going to discover that she is dating a demon? That was first and foremost, the challenge of deciding when she was gonna figure it out and what the breadcrumbs would be. We really loved this idea of being able to tell the story of their realization that when they hit 18, that’s the age at which you stop being able to experience magic. We really loved that metaphor of coming of age and hitting that threshold when you become an adult, and what happens if you’re not ready for that and you’re gonna try to hold on? That really became Tyler’s story. And we knew we wanted to give Nina a love interest this season, so we started talking about that story and that character. That’s where we started, in our very early talks about what we wanted to see this season.
Did the whole Kinsey dating a demon situation change and evolve, as the story went along?
CUSE: I’ve learned, over the years, that shows are organic entities and they take on a life of their own. Obviously, you’re collaborating with a lot of other people, principally all of the actors that are playing your parts, and it delighted us to see Griffin Gluck play a bad guy. It’s very different than what he’s done in his career and he was great at it. This relationship that started to unfold between him and Hallea Jones, who plays Eden, Meredith and I just wrote for that. We loved it. We felt like that was just going to be so delicious and delightful for the audience. That was just a thread that we followed, and a lot of that had to do with how great the actors were, playing those two parts.
Was there anything that you guys learned from making the first season that you carried over into the second season, or that affected the season, in some way? Was there anything from the production itself or the character dynamics that you felt worked or didn’t work, that had an effect on Season 2?
AVERILL: That’s a good question.
CUSE: In general, everything that we do affects what we do, going forward. For instance, we had a high degree of confidence that all three of our Locke kids were really great actors. There was a lot of bickering and fighting between them, and we wanted to unite them more this season, which was a reflection of how bonded and connected the actors were, off screen. With stuff like that, there’s definitely a carry forward. There was a confidence that we had that we could give any of those three kids anything, and they would crush it. We leaned into stuff like that, that we learned, based on prior experience.
AVERILL: We also really loved the character of Duncan Locke, but we were not able to tell many stories with him in Season 1, just because we were so focused on telling the story of the kids, discovering what had happened to their father, 25 years ago. He’s a small part of that, so we didn’t get to give Aaron Ashmore that much to do. So, we were really excited to be able to tell a much larger story with him in Season 2.
You’re exploring the past and the present, but you’re also going back even further into the past this season. What are the challenges of weaving all of that together throughout the season, to the point where it ends in a really important way?
AVERILL: There’s a real rich mythology in the comics that Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez created, that goes back to the Revolutionary War and that really tells the origin story of the black door and the very first key maker and the very first key. So much of our show is about how the past is influencing the present. You saw that in Season 1, with what happened with the keepers of the keys and how that was affecting our kids today. So, we loved the idea of being able to show the audience that it actually goes back much, much further than that. The consequences of what happened in 1775 are actually coming back now to affect what our kids are doing. It’s giving that context and depth, to where these keys actually come from, and it just makes the show so much richer.
You have some wild things going on this season, from a giant spider, to a large glass that can contain a human being, to Winterfest, to the destruction of that insane house toward the end. Was there a personal favorite visual moment that you had this season, or something you thought was just really cool to get to do?
CUSE: Eden trapped in the glass just makes me laugh in delight. There was no way to watch it too many times in editing. It was just too incredible.
AVERILL: I love the mannequins in Episode 5, which Carlton directed. I just think they’re so creepy. I love the way their heads move. I love the way they walk. I think they’re awesome.
Carlton, what was it like to add directing an episode, on top of all of the other things that are going on with the show like this?
CUSE: We were locked down in Los Angeles for many, many months, so being able to go to Toronto and actually interact in person with our crew and cast was really super special. That was in November, before people were vaccinated, so it was in the midst of the COVID of it all. It was just really rewarding to be able to go up there and be deeply immersed in the making of the show, with all of the other people who were making the show, as opposed to doing it virtually. It was effective and we were able to do it, but it’s just not the same when you’re actually there.
How do you approach character deaths with this show? Do you refer to the source material? Do you not feel bound by whether a specific character lives or dies in the comic? Do you start a season with knowing exactly what characters are going to end up dead, or does that change?
AVERILL: I wouldn’t say we feel necessarily bound by the character does in the comic books. I think we have followed many of them, though they may meet their end in different ways. It always just comes from what the story is asking of it, and it’s never gratuitous for us. It’s always about, what is this death going to mean? Is it a death of sacrifice? How has that death gonna affect our characters, moving forward? That’s how we’ve always approached it.
Has there ever been anyone you thought would be dead who isn’t, or who is dead that you didn’t think would be?
AVERILL: I think there have been ideas floated for characters that we ended up changing our minds about. That’s just going through the writers’ room and saying, “Okay, if this character dies, what’s that going to mean for the rest of our characters? Does the character have a place in our future? Would we be sad to get rid of that character?” Though we are doing a show about magic where technically you can bring some people back. I can’t think specifically of any character that we chose not to kill.
Very appropriately, the finale of the season is called “Cliffhanger.” Did you know, at that point, that you’d be doing a third season, or were you running the risk of that being the last episode of the show, if it hadn’t gotten picked up?
CUSE: We had actually already written a good chunk of Season 3, before we even started filming Season 2. It was actually a really weird thing that I’ve never experienced in my career, to have written a full season of television that hadn’t been made, and we had to go on to writing the next season of television. It gave us a lot of opportunities to recalibrate certain things, as we were going along.
AVERILL: It was more a play on the fact that there is a house that literally falls off a cliff, at the end of that episode.
At the end of the season, Tyler has made the choice to not use the memory key and to have a normal life. What can you say about how that might affect things for him in Season 3? Will we see how that choice impacts him?
AVERILL: I don’t think we wanna spoil too much for Season 3, but that decision does have consequences and will change his relationship to his family. You’ll see that play out.
By the end of the season, Kinsey is left with knowing about this betrayal from her boyfriend who was really a demon. How will that change her?
CUSE: Everybody has bad relationships. You pick up the pieces, and you move on.
How will Season 3 compare to Season 2? How are you feeling about where you’re leaving things, by the end of the third season?
AVERILL: The third season focuses much more heavily on the family. They’re gonna face the greatest threat they’ve had to face yet. That really bonds them in a way that we’ve never seen before. I can’t say more than that. Part of our challenge, that we happily take on, is that every season, we need to outdo the season before it. It’s a challenge, but it’s a fun one, and I think we’ve been able to do that.
Do you have a moment in Season 2 when you feel like it’s all clicked and you’ve surpassed what you’ve done the season before?
CUSE: Totally. It’s like any other challenge that you set out for yourself. When we watch the finished episodes and we finally get them to the place where Meredith and I are happy with them, it’s really satisfying and we’re actually were like, “This is gonna be great. We can’t wait for [the fans] to see this.” We really challenged ourselves to make the show better this season, and I really feel like we did.
Locke & Key is available to stream at Netflix.