The second season of Freeform’s Cruel Summer has been a surprise hit for the Disney-owned network. With the first installment airing in 2021, the mystery teen drama returned, becoming the network’s top-watched telecast since the first premiered. Mxdwn was able to chat with the three leads – Sadie Stanley, Lexi Underwood, and Griffin Gluck – at the ATX TV Festival this past June.

An anthology series, Cruel Summer unravels a new mystery each season set against the backdrop of life in the past. Viewers follow the main characters during three different timelines: before, during, and after a heinous crime. This season, viewers are introduced to Megan and Isabella (played by Stanley and Underwood, respectively), two teen girls who become best friends in the summer of 1999. They share everything, including an admiration for Megan’s longtime male best friend, Luke (Gluck). The three are inseparable until one day, Luke goes missing, only for his body to be recovered from the nearby lake. With both considered suspects, Megan and Isabella now share one goal: keeping the truth from getting out.

How did you prepare for this role? What research did you find yourself doing, if any?

Gluck: You know it’s interesting. I hope this doesn’t make me sound lazy as an actor, but the preparation for me was – you know the 2000s and 1999 aspect for me – at the end of the day was really an aesthetic thing. To me one of the main differences was people didn’t have the same level of technology – kids didn’t. It wasn’t as easy for them to contact and reach each other and do this and social anxiety on the internet and all these things. I pretty much tried to leave my phone in my apartment when I got to Vancouver. For like full days and just walk around, try to meet up with someone at a coffee shop at 2. If they’re there, they’re there, if they’re not, they’re not, and try to figure out something else to do. So that’s kind of what I did to prepare.

Underwood: I was able to take stuff that helped me get into the character of Pearl (Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere) and bring that to Isabella. It’s literally only a two-year difference. But when it came to immersing myself in the world of Isabella and this project in general, I did the same thing I did for Pearl: I made Venn diagrams between Isabella and me so that I could understand the similarities and differences between her and me. Because even though I wasn’t alive at that time, the cool thing about the show is that no matter what generation you are you can relate to a character in some shape or form. At the end of the day, they’re just teens trying to figure out life and making mistakes along the way.

And then also music, I used music as a tool. I made playlists for Summer ’99, Winter ‘99, and Summer ‘00 Isabella, because all three are very different versions of her. And I’m sure that the music that she listened to as well changed over a period of time. So doing things like that really helped me immerse into the character.

Stanley: I sat down and I binged it [season one] in like three days. Loved it. Made me so excited to get started. And really prepared me. Even as a viewer watching it, it’s kind of a learning curve watching the three different timelines and keeping them straight. I already knew it was three different timelines but seeing it I was like ‘alright I need to be prepared and be on my shit,’ for lack of a better word. It was intriguing to get to play three different characters. I wanted it to feel different from the first season, but it has its similarities.

Your character, Megan, is going to college to study computer science. How did you prepare to be this computer genius?

Stanley: Well, I’m not a computer whiz by any means. I don’t know anything. But my brothers both are into computer science and coding. So, I kind of knew some stuff from them. And also, I kind of had to think about it in terms of the timeline as well because we’re in Y2K, we’re in 1999 – the internet was very different at the time. So, I had to do some research too, the language is different about computers, and it just wasn’t as evolved. So, there was some research done and some YouTube videos that were looked up to know what I needed to know to make it feel real.

Lexi, your character was an archetype in a lot of teen films and TV in the early 2000s, but they were rarely played by women of color. Was Isabella’s race/ethnicity included in the casting?

Underwood: That’s a great question. My audition was a bit different because I originally auditioned for Megan, and I didn’t get it. And things happened on set, and I was brought in later on after they started filming. But I know originally, the actress before me, she was also Black. I don’t even know what the breakdown or description of Isabella looked like because I had no clue when I was auditioning for Megan that Isabella was even a part of the story. I just knew it was something between Megan and Luke. So when I joined, it wasn’t necessarily a conversation or question. For me then, I was very on it with looks and stuff making sure that if we’re going to do it, make the Black girl the ‘It girl.’ Make sure that all her looks were bomb and she had all the personality and all of it going on.

Griffin, a central theme of the plot is gender roles and consent. How was this handled for the show given the verbiage we have now about consent didn’t quite exist in 1999?

Gluck: Elle Triedman who is our showrunner made it very clear that was one of the subjects she really wanted to tackle on this. The double standard and misogyny: if a guy gets with two girls, he’s a hero, he’s like a champion, he’s a stud. But if a girl does the same thing, she’s ostracized by the entire town. Which is exactly what you see play out in the show. I don’t know if any of us got any big speech or anything about ‘This is the impact,’ but we definitely all had conversations on and off set. When Elle gave us the script and we saw the misogyny was so blatant we were all like, ‘This is gross guys, I don’t know if we wanna do this.’ She was like ‘Well, I hate to break it to you, but this is how it was.’ So, I’m really glad we were able to touch on these things.

New episodes of Cruel Summer air Monday at 10 p.m. ET on Freeform and the next day on Hulu.

Photo credit: Waytao Shing