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Santa Clarita Diet
Santa Clarita Diet is a humble show with a simple concept: a chipper Santa Clarita realtor, played by the effervescent Drew Barrymore, becomes an undead flesh-eating zombie. It’s a comedy, a romance, and a caper about the power of familiar love. So, okay, maybe it’s not so simple. Maybe it’s actually super duper weird.
Santa Clarita Diet is coming back for a second season later this month. Barrymore is back as Sheila Hammond and Justified star Timothy Olyphant is returning as Sheila’s steadfast husband Joel. At a recent press event, Olyphant described the show to reporters as “so ridiculously outlandish, but at the same time, oddly old-fashioned. You take away the eating people part, it’s kind of an old-fashioned family comedy. [It’s] almost like a 1940s romantic comedy.”
Season 2 of Santa Clarita Diet picks up right where Season 1 left off, and Barrymore and Olyphant promised more heart, soul, humor, and drama this year. In many ways, you see this tonal symphony in the show’s new trailer. We see scenes of high comedy and touching moments, like when Sheila tells Joel, “Don’t give up on me.” The irony being that’s something that could be said in a relationship that isn’t hampered by cannibalism.
Olyphant said, “I think the season is funnier and it also has more depth in the second. I think we trusted the drama. You know, I think we’ve had a little more room to know that all the scenes don’t have to be funny, which was nice. It made it fun. And I also think the stakes over the course of the season…”
“Are a lot higher,” Barrymore said.
“[It] gets so high where you really feel like we, as a family, may not be able to really sustain this,” said Olyphant.
Barrymore explained, “But also we’re not like ‘discovering’ this season. We know this is our new norm. So I think it’s almost a lot about our moral compass of how we’re going to do this. Could we take out people who the planet would be better off without? Versus the accidental man in the parking lot. And I think that Sheila is very selfish and living in her Id in the first season and just kind of all about the euphoria of how she now feels. And I think she’s much more sensitive to Joel and what it must be like for him and they just have discoveries about the circumstances of how this happened.”
Olyphant teased that the scope of Santa Clarita Diet opens up in Season 2. “There’s a really fun whole thing this year about investigating how this actually happened and the mystery of it. And whether or not there’s a possibility that it becomes a worldwide problem. Then this couple [is] trying not only now to keep their marriage together, but to save the world at the same time.”
“In this very small Santa Clarita way,” Barrymore quipped. “It does open up, I think the way that we leave Season 2 has a lot of possibilities for Season 3. I think the Season 1 cliffhanger was sort of like ambiguous and almost didn’t feel like an ending, but I think I really liked that about it. There’s a bunch of stuff going on in the way we leave this that’s also going to start a whole new fucking debate. So, that’s fun.”
One thing not so fun for Barrymore is doing stunts. An interviewer reminded Barrymore that she almost died shooting Season 1.
“Oh god, that wasn’t funny. That was really scary. I get so freaked out everytime I think about it,” Barrymore said. “It was very real and I’ve never had that happen on a show. I jumped on this guy’s back and he didn’t catch me, but he held legs. So I went straight backwards and hit my head on the concrete from like a six foot height and I was in the hospital for two days. So it was just so scary.”
Barrymore then said, “I basically now will only have a stunt double. I’m 43.”
“And there are people that will do that for you,” said Olyphant.
“Yeah, no they want to do it,” Barrymore said before singing the praises of her “grasshopper”-like stunt double Lucy. “So I’m like those days are over. We’re good. We got to be a Charlie’s Angels, that was fun. Now we’re a mom…43 year-old soft mom.”
Barrymore is indeed a mother and it was important for her to keep a key part of her job a secret from her young daughters. Namely, she didn’t ever want them to see her covered in fake blood.
She explained, “I had to lie to my kids all the time because I shower at work. Because it was head to toe and I didn’t want to come home that way to my children. But I would always miss spots and they would be like, ‘What is this?’ And I was like, ‘I’m painting.’ As Tim said, it’s more of the follow up questions that are going to be tough.”
“It’s a Rothko period. You’re doing a lot of red,” he joked.
Season 2 of Santa Clarita Diet premieres on Netflix on Friday, March 23rd.
