Ready to hunt for the first looks at the long-awaited Mindhunter season 2?
On Wednesday morning, the streaming giant dropped a series of new photos through a special non-public interactive website for press. The site allows users to explore more than 200 new images from the second season, which rejoins Jonathan Groff’s F.B.I. Agent Holden Ford, Holt McCallany’s Agent Bill Trench, and Anna Torv’s Wendy Carr.
Here’s the catch: access to the site expires after the user exceeds 90 minutes. So, various stills from the new episodes will be available from different outlets.
Back in 2017, Fincher teased in an interview with Billboard, “Next year we’re looking at the Atlanta child murders, so we’ll have a lot more African-American music which will be nice. The music will evolve. It’s intended to support what’s happening with the show and for the show to evolve radically between seasons.” The images confirm as much as we see Ford holding a case file labeled “Atlanta.”
Press who remained long enough on the interactive site — viewing a certain amount of images and downloading eight to their desktops — received access to a teaser trailer, one that confirmed the return of fan-favorite Ed Kemper (Cameron Britton) and the debut of Damon Herriman as Charles Manson. (Fun fact: Herriman also plays Charles Manson in Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.)
In the footage, still not made public at the time, Holden and Trench visit Kemper to once again pick his brain about killers. “He has an overwhelming fantasy life, fantasies of what he’s done, what he wants to do,” their egg sandwich-loving buddy mentions of their new target. “His dreams will consume him. Soon the real world won’t even compare.”
“How do we catch a fantasy, Ed?” Trench asks.
“If he’s any good, you can’t,” Kemper replies.
Other photos reveal Joe Tuttle’s return as Gregg Smith (ever eager to help the psycho squad), Albert Jones as (presumably) another agent investigating the Atlanta child murders, Lauren Glazier as a potential new bartender love interest for Carr (they’re seen going to the movies and bowling together), the return of BTK (the elusive killer lurking in the periphery in season 1), and what appears to be the debut of David Berkowitz (a.k.a. Son of Sam).
In one photo, Ford’s team is seen in front of a white board with the words “Bateson – Bag Murderer.” This is likely in reference to the season addressing Paul Bateson, a convicted murderer who was implicated in the unsolved slayings of gay men in Manhattan. Underneath Bateson’s name is a line that reads, “dismemberment of gay men.”
Joe Penhall (The Road) created Mindhunter, which premiered its first season in October 2017 with a story about a special team at the F.B.I. investigating the inner workings of psychopaths in the 1970s. McCallany, speaking previously with EW, said Fincher since “took control over the arc of the story” and Penhall “is no longer with the project.”
New episodes of Mindhunter will premiere on Netlfix this Aug. 16.
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