The first three episodes of the second season of the Peabody Award-winning Apple TV Plus original series Dickinson were made available to stream on the platform on January 8, TV Line reports. This season sees the young Emily Dickinson (Hailee Steinfeld, Pitch Perfect 2) growing apart from her most trusted companion Sue Gilbert (Ella Hunt, Anna and the Apocalypse), contemplating the decision to publish her poetry, and dealing with the trappings of fame, according to TV Line.
Emily stepping into the limelight means that her social circle will inevitably grow, which means viewers can expect to welcome new actors into the show’s wild world, including Pico Alexander (Home Again) and Finn Jones (Game of Thrones), as well as Big Mouth cast members Ayo Edebiri (Sunnyside) and Nick Kroll (FX’s What We Do in the Shadows). Edebiri’s character was introduced to the world via a brief teaser uploaded to Instagram on October 8 by Anna Baryshnikov (Manchester By The Sea), who plays Emily’s younger sister Lavinia.
Edebiri’s journey on the show began in the writer’s room, as was the case for her on Big Mouth, W Magazine reports. Dickinson‘s creator and showrunner Alena Smith (The Affair) allegedly found herself so enamored with Edebiri’s presence that, when she sat down to write the character of Hattie, she wrote with the podcaster and stand-up comedian at the forefront of her mind. “[I was] just so captivated by… her sort of just delicious sense of humor,” she explained to The Daily Beast.
When it came time to cast someone to play the specter of Dickinson’s New England-based contemporary Edgar Allan Poe (The Murders in the Rue Morgue), Smith went with Edebiri’s Big Mouth cast-mate Nick Kroll. She had previously cast writer and comedian John Mulaney (Saturday Night Live, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse), another Big Mouth player, as hirsute Henry David Thoreau (Walden) in season one. Referencing Kroll and Mulaney’s long-running double act The Oh, Hello Show, Smith claimed that it was inevitable that Kroll would show up in the series: “We had to have both halves of Oh, Hello… So that was just mandatory,” via The Daily Beast.
With regard to Jones, who shows up in season two as newspaper publisher Samuel Bowles, Steinfeld had plenty of praise for the actor’s ability to find his groove without the privilege of a complete knowledge base. “We were shooting season two, and season one was coming out. There was a lot going on, and a lot of figuring out that was still taking place as far as each individual scene and episode. But Finn brought this wonderful element of mystery and intrigue to season two, and that’s a lot of what season two is,” Steinfeld told Digital Spy.
New episodes of Dickinson‘s second season will come out on a weekly basis from January 15 to February 26, as reported by Decider. Apple TV Plus is priced at $4.99 a month.