Peyton’s a great person to act alongside, and this season especially, we do a lot of really vulnerable stuff together. I’m just grateful that she’s so professional. It’s always a good vibe. And truly, not only is Peyton amazing, but the rest of the cast and the crew are as well. There are many things that would’ve felt really weird had we not felt incredibly comfortable with everybody in the room.
Other than that, when it comes to the emotional beats and the storyline, we don’t know what’s coming. The only thing I knew about this show when I signed on was what Wally had in episodes one and two of the first season, which was not very much. With every episode that came our way, I feel like every cast member was just relieved. We all had our ideas of where the show [was] going — we were all wrong. Their show is so much better than what any of us thought of. I thought season one was fantastic, and I think season two, especially the second half, really cements itself as a genius, brilliant show.
You really do have to pay attention, especially in season two.
And that’s a testament to great writing. They never make it in your face. If there’s something that’s important, it might just be a little slip-in, a line that you don’t even realize until later. I love those eureka moments. We get multiple an episode this season.
Have you watched the edit of the Ghost scene?
I haven’t yet. That’s episode seven. I’m very excited to see it.
I can imagine it’s hard when you have what are supposed to be teenagers doing those types of referential scenes.
It’s also really interesting because, yes, they are in “high schooler bodies,” but they have evolved so much.
Except Maddie.
Right, true. I would even say that Maddie is the reason Wally is beginning to evolve. He has been there for 40 years, but he really hasn’t aged 40 years. When she gets there, it’s like he really starts doing all of this adult thinking within a matter of a month, and it flips his world upside down. I think that they had the opportunity to evolve the whole time they’ve been in that afterlife, but they needed something. For Wally, it was Maddie. For Charley, it’s Yuri. And for Rhonda, it could be Quinn.
Speaking of Wally’s emotional intelligence, something interesting about this season is that he is obviously the comic relief — he has the silly lines and then the dance scene.
That one was fun.
But then he also has some of the harder emotional scenes, like everybody else experiencing their own death in the scars, but Wally watching his own death.
That was something I was curious about when we got the script, that Rhonda went in and experienced it. Like, “Shoot, am I going to have to go through this thing?” I think it’s so great that they did it this way for Wally, because his trauma wasn’t how he died, really. His trauma has been, since then, looking back on these things. He did it for his mom. He says in episode four, “When I died, I felt nothing, no fear or no pain.” But when he’s in the scar, he feels the pressure from his mom and the coach and the crowd. That is something that I felt, as Milo, in my life, and it was easy to draw from when doing that scene. But he’s so tragic. He’s such a good guy.
There’s the other scene where Wally is addressing his past homophobia, which I think is really interesting because the show plays on nostalgia so much, but it also proves how we see things from the past with a modern lens.
When I saw that this was a part of his past, which I was kind of dreading, my first thing was, Okay, this is going to be a big emotional journey for Wally. And when I shot that scene with Nick [Pugliese], it’s like Milo and Wally felt the same thing. This isn’t about me, this is about him, and this is about listening.
