The Mysterious Benedict Society Creatives Talks Puzzles and Forced Happiness In Season 2
The first season of The Mysterious Benedict Society ended with Curtain reinventing himself as a self-help guru selling happiness and taking credit for ending the Emergency, which he initially started. Kristen Schaal calls season 2 “a buffet of adventure, thrills, and fun” as now Curtain has kidnapped Benedict and Number 2 and it’s up to the rest of the Benedict Society to come together to save them. I spoke with the cast and creatives at New York Comic Con about the new season, forced happiness, and puzzles.
Tony Hale continues juggling the dual roles of Curtain and Benedict in season 2. “Hair, makeup, wardrobe, they do so much [to] help get in the character,” he shared about how he differentiates the estranged brothers. “Little things like obviously Benedict’s posture is really bad, Curtain’s posture is really good. But also Curtain does not listen to people, he just talks to people, and Benedict listens. He cares.”
“This is what I do because we’re in a lot of scenes together in season 2,” joked Kristen Schaal. “I go into Tony’s trailer, which is bigger than Will Smith’s. It’s in his contract. I go into his trailer and I get in his face and I go ‘Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?’ until he says the right name.”
This season finds Curtain creating a fake form of happiness that he wants to spread to the world to control people, which is a new concept that was not introduced in the books by Trenton Lee Stewart. But can you really be happy without experiencing all the other emotions to contextualize it? “I have two daughters who have grown up in social media — and we all are on social media too — but the idea of seeing all their friends so happy and smiling. That's not real. You can't be that way all the time. You need to have a spectrum of emotions to get there in order to feel really happy,” said co-showrunner Todd Slavkin. “We wanted to share that message with the world. That it's okay not to be happy.”
Co-creator Phil Hay continued: “Where does real happiness come from? If we were to have an answer for that, it comes from your relationships with other people and how you can help other people and exist in a community. That’s happiness to us.”
While some of the puzzles come from the book series, they create new original puzzles for season 2 as well. “The challenge with puzzles […] is to make it accessible to people, so you don’t lose them in the headiness of it all. We love to make it come from these characters and the way that they solve it is through the lens of each of [them] and what they bring to it,” said Slavkin about connecting the puzzles to each character’s skill set, with Hay adding: “There’s the technical fun of the puzzle, but what really matters is what it means to the characters. From our perspective as writers, what’s interesting to us is why is this the perfect or completely imperfect puzzle for this person to have to solve?”
Co-creator Matt Manfredi continued: “Like wouldn’t it be cool if the solution to this puzzle was a memory or something emotional and how can we get to that? So now you’re going backwards, which is maybe a little easier.”
“They’re definitely cool, but not something I’m good at in real life,” said Seth B. Carr, while Emmy DeOliveira added that she loves puzzles and brain teasers.
The cast and creatives teased some of their favorite moments in season 2. “A lot of the ship scenes are fun, running through the Queen Mary. It’s a very big ship so getting to run around and do scenes over there were pretty cool,” said Carr, with DeOliveira sharing: “We had quite a few night shoots this season. They’re my favorite because you can’t have school after a certain time so in-between scenes we just get to hang out. We had one really good one later in the season where we’re running in an open field. I tripped very hard and fell [while] we were running through this tall grass.”
“Everything that happens on The Shortcut, which is the fastest ocean liner in the world. That’s an iconic part of the second book that’s really enjoyable. We have some great guest stars who show up,” said Hay. “There’s a moment where Tony Hale dances that is really spectacular. He’s a really good dancer and we give him a full dance number.”
Manfredi shared: “That’s what I love about this show is we get to go on these little tangents and we get to go on these little side trips to explore the characters.”
New episodes of The Mysterious Benedict Society season 2 drop Tuesdays on Disney+.
