Christine Baranski, Murray Bartlett, and more “Nine Perfect Strangers ”stars on why ‘you should be scared’ of season 2

• Nine Perfect Strangers stars Christine Baranski, Murray Bartlett, Annie Murphy, Mark Strong, and Maisie Richardson-Sellers take EW inside the ‘chaos’ of season 2’s icy mountaintop retreat.

• Baranski, Bartlett, and Strong say Nicole Kidman’s commanding performance as a major draw to joining the cast, teasing where her enigmatic Masha Dmitrichenko aims to push their characters – and if they’ll survive.

• Murphy and Bartlett concur that the cast “really did become a family” during the six-month shoot in Germany, and warns of the rest of the “rollercoaster” of season 2: “You should be scared.”

Pack your bags and have your medical history handy, it’s time for another round of Nicole Kidman-assisted psychedelic torture.

Nine Perfect Strangers, the hit Hulu limited series adapted from the Liane Moriarty book of the same name, returns for a second season. Moriarty’s 2018 romp ended where the David E. Kelley series ended in 2021, but the people rose in cacophonous protest, letting their demands be known: We want more Masha Dmitrichenko! And we want her in the Bavarian Alps!

So Kelley, co-showrunner John-Henry Butterworth, and Kidman, who plays the enigmatic Russian wellness guru kindly obliged, serving up nine brand new strangers and plenty more drama in a wintry, idyllic retreat. Ahead of the second season premiere, Entertainment Weekly checked up on five of Masha’s new guests (patients? inmates?) – Christine Baranski, Murray Bartlett, Annie Murphy, Mark Strong, and Maisie Richardson-Sellers – to break down the first two legs of this twisted trip.

As if they still haven’t fully checked out of Zauberwald, the Gothic, hilltop estate that Lena Olin’s Helena cedes full control over to Masha for her unhinged experiments, the cast of Nine Perfect Strangers season 2 are quite unanimous on what prompted them to sign on to the show’s second season.

“The arc for this character as an actor is super exciting. You get to play all these different facets, you get a complete rollercoaster ride, and it’s Nicole Kidman,” says Bartlett, who plays Brian Tumkin, a disgraced children’s TV host haunted by intrusive hallucinations of his ventriloquist puppet. Strong, who plays David Sharpe, the smoldering billionaire with a secret connection to Masha, has a past of his own with Kidman, having costarred in the 2014 psychological thriller Before I Go To Sleep. “I felt with Nicole… we just picked up on where we left off and we were very confident in each other’s company, and I think that helped enormously,” he says.

Baranski, who plays the fabulous hedonist Victoria with – you guessed it – a dark secret on deck, muses about the decision to board Nine Perfect Strangers‘ second season, “Work comes along, you say, ‘Whoa, okay, Nicole Kidman, second season, these are the actors who might be involved, it shoots in Europe.’ I’m like, ‘I’m on board.'”

Kidman is the only holdover from the series’ first and (originally) only planned season. With a single-track mind on “healing from trauma,” her Masha drove the last ennead of strangers (Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon, Regina Hall, to name just three) through a gauntlet of deceptively delivered and increasingly potent doses of psilocybin, and into madness, strife, and even suicide.

She plans more of the same for the second season’s kennel of guinea pigs, which also includes Imogen (Murphy), Victoria’s cynical, therapy-obsessed daughter who privately pines for her mother’s love; Peter (Henry Golding), David’s son on an even more hopeless parental validation quest; Agnes (Dolly de Leon), a famous former nun seeking divine forgiveness for a terrible transgression; Matteo (Aras Aydin), the dashing paramour Victoria’s brought along to thwart any hope Imogen has for quality time; Tina (King Princess), a piano prodigy who’s lost touch with her instrument; Wolfie (Richardson-Sellers), Tina’s girlfriend and full-time cheerleader; and Martin (Lucas Englander), Helena’s son, charged with the impossible task of reining in the freewheeling Masha.

The remote mountain retreat does three jobs at once for Masha – forces her motley crew of guests to bond, keeps them from getting out no matter how unhinged her “therapy” becomes, and keeps a wave of federal investigations into her season 1 actions from getting in. Bartlett says the long location shoot achieved the same end of bringing the cast together, without the psychoactives or subpoenas.

“This was six months, so it really did become a family out of necessity. We were willing, but you really rely on each other and become very close,” he explains. Murphy agrees, recalling, “you throw a bunch of people across the ocean, away from their friends and family and their own beds, especially when those people are really, at their core, a bunch of theater nerds who are so excited to be in an acting troupe… and everyone just really clicked.”

Though the jaded, unerringly critical Imogen is a far cry from Alexis Rose, Murphy’s breakout role on the beloved Canadian comedy series Schitt’s Creek, Masha would probably place them on the same treatment regimen on account of their vain, daffy, and distant mothers.

“Imogen was so fun because at her core, she loves her mom, and she idolizes her mom, and she wants to be like her mom,” however “devastatingly hurt” Victoria’s neglect may also make her feel. Murphy reveals that she “even tried to talk like Christine a little bit, heighten my enunciation a little bit,” to slip into the character’s psychology.

“Baranski is everything you could possibly want Christine Baranski to be, plus so much more. She is just, her sense of humor is so wicked,” Murphy gushes. “Her lust for life is insatiable. She made the most of the experience more than anyone else. She was constantly in museums, and at concerts, and going on trips, and just reading historical fiction based on the places where we were… she’s such a wonderful role model.”

Related: How Seth Rogen helped inform the drug trip scenes in Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers

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Baranski infused Victoria, whom she characterizes as “a worldly person,” with some of her own globe-trotting savoir faire. “I love to study history, particularly European history. The fact that we were in Germany allowed me to really deep dive into the Austro-Hungarian empire and Germany before the war,” she says. “I’m a lover of music and opera, so I was always going, whether it was Wagner, Puccini, I’d be at the Munich Opera House… I just couldn’t read and study enough about where I was, so it was a very rich experience for me as an actress and as a person.”

Though the two-part season 2 premiere introduces the mother-daughter pair as perhaps the two least likely to succeed in their stated goal of reconciliation, Baranski encourages the audience to have hope. “She loves the fact that her daughter’s so smart. She’s almost intimidated by her daughter,” Baranski reasons, citing the characters’ barbed “senses of humor” as an opportunity to “realize how similar these two women are.”

“I think that where Imogen and Victoria end up, that to me is kind of like the love story of the show,” Murphy teases.

The love story Masha sought out explicitly to rewrite, however, is the one between Richardson-Sellers’ Wolfie and King Princess’ Tina. The fact that Wolfie and Tina fight, misunderstand each other, and seek solace in sometimes destructive ways doesn’t scare Richardson-Sellers; it’s a point of pride.

“I think it’s a real privilege to be able to show queerness in its many, many multifaceted ways, especially whereby the queerness is not the center of the story, and queer pain is not the center of the story. It’s just people,” she says. “It’s people who are struggling through loss and the relationship is breaking, but they happen to be queer… I hope it’s slightly a lesson, but also that there is hope. I think this is a story of unraveling and then what’s left – can they survive through that?”

Strong’s David arrives at Zauberwald later than the rest, and has a chip on his shoulder about therapy that’s bigger than the rest’s. “David represents the kind guy who’s like, ‘It’s not going to affect me, don’t expect me to be vulnerable, don’t expect me to open up about anything. It’s not going to work. I don’t need therapizing. I know exactly who I am and what I’m doing,'” Strong says.

He continues, “You realize that although his son, Peter, thinks he’s coming in order to bond with him, you slowly learn that there’s a history between him and Masha, and actually what he’s coming to do is check up on her because he’s intrigued by her. I think the therapy thing is a total side issue for him. And of course what happens is she sort of lures him and encourages him to take part in it, and, yeah, chaos ensues.”

Chaos is personified in Bartlett’s Brian, who spends his first few minutes of screen time having a meltdown on a ski lift and conscripting de Leon’s Agnes into sherpa-ing his luggage up to Zauberwald, after mistaking her for the help.

Describing the character as “an actor’s dream,” Bartlett explains, “I invented this whole backstory for Brian that he had a terrible childhood, and so he went into this area of children’s TV with a real mission and deep care for the children that he was making the show for, to give them a kind of experience that he never had as a child.”

“He has this line, which I’m going to paraphrase,” Bartlett continues, “where he says, ‘Sometimes people fail because they don’t care, and sometimes people fail because they care too much.’ That kind of sums him up.”

To use Richardson-Sellers’ word, will Brian survive his trauma? Will any of them once Masha’s through with them? When asked what viewers can expect embarking past these first two episodes, deep into the hinterlands of Nine Perfect Strangers season 2, Bartlett offers an ominous warning – “You should be scared.”

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