Change was inevitable for Miles and his family after learning his fate during season 1 of Blindspotting.
While the family grappled with the initial aftermath of Miles heading to prison during the show’s debut to the world last year, reality has now set in as he starts his five-year sentence at San Quentin.
“We arrive with Ashley on very high anxiety because this is nine months later from when the last time you saw them,” Jasmine Cephas Jones told Shadow and Act her portrayal of Miles’ wife. “And she has a lot of pent-up feelings that she has not dealt with. And at the same time, everybody is telling her that she’s not fun. So she is trying to find a sense of self and who she is without Miles and that’s really hard to do.”
Rafael Casal explained how viewers will witness Miles peeling back the layers of who he is as a person.
“What’s really going on with Miles as he has been in San Quentin for nine months,” said Casal. “And so we’re starting with someone who’s sort of in a very different mental health space than before and season 1 we didn’t really get a big window into who Miles is, we’re really focused on Ashley and everyone outside, but this season, we get a little bit of a deeper dive into how he’s doing and how that affects the family.”
Showrunner Daveed Diggs says the main focus is to continue to shed light on the impact that the prison industrial complex has on the loved ones of the incarcerated.
“Season 1 was really about the beginning of this process, it was about the shock of having a loved one removed from the family and being incarcerated,” Diggs explained. “This season is sort of about the continuation, it’s about the stasis. How do you persevere as a family? After we’ve sort of established that we are making the choice to persevere as a family, right? And so that’s kind of where we meet them. Iit brings up a whole bunch of new, interesting, sort of smaller tidbits about how various people deal with that.”
Helen Hunt echoes the sentiment that Blindspotting is here to show the ripple effects of a judicial system that doesn’t always play fair.
“The show is about the fact that for every single person in prison, there’s how many people around them, how many daughters and sons and mothers and wives and siblings and friends are affected,” she shared. “And so they made this beautiful movie about this place, and then I remember hearing they were going to make the TV show, and I thought, ‘It’s a bad idea.’ They did it, but then they told me, ‘Well actually, this is going to center around Jasmine’s character.’ And they’re so smart, they’re so smart to give the other people this person’s life a voice and real stories.”
Blindspotting has returned to Starz for season 2 with weekly episodes airing every Friday at 9 p.m.
Check out the full cast interviews above.
