Co-creator Damon Lindelof and star Justin Theroux talk about the show’s second season — its move to Texas, diversifying the cast, and why it almost didn’t return.
Van Redin / HBO
A meditation on grief, anger, survival, loss, and madness — it's safe to say that there's never been anything on television like The Leftovers. Tom Perrotta's 2011 novel of the same name examined the aftermath of the disappearance of 2% of the world's population through characters in a small New York town; Perrotta and Damon Lindelof (Lost) co-created The Leftovers for HBO, and its first season aired last year. For some critics and viewers, the show was just too sad — "grim" and "grimness" were a frequent criticism.
It had its champions, too, of course. And those who stuck with the show through its first 10 episodes were rewarded with an unprecedented emotional experience. Also, yes: even some hope for these characters' futures. Justin Theroux, Carrie Coon, Amy Brenneman, Liv Tyler, Christopher Eccleston, Margaret Qualley, and Chris Zylka led the cast in its first season, and they will all be back in its second, though The Leftovers' center will move from Mapleton, New York, to Miracle, Texas — a town that claims to have lost no one in The Sudden Departure. Miracle, therefore, is a place where Kevin Garvey (Theroux), his daughter, Jill (Qualley), and his girlfriend, Nora Durst (Coon), along with their new adopted baby, will seek safety. And there, the Garvey-Dursts will meet the Murphy family (led by Regina King and Kevin Carroll), who clearly have their own secrets.
BuzzFeed News talked with Lindelof and Theroux, who had to leave to go to a press conference about two-thirds of the way through the conversation, about The Leftovers' new location and characters, why Lindelof almost thought one season was enough, and for Theroux, why working with Lindelof reminds him of working with David Lynch.
Oh, and — why the hell Ann Dowd is back on the show when her character, Patti Levin, the leader of the Guilty Remnant, is dead!
Justin, what was your reaction when Damon told you the show was going to mostly move from Mapleton to Miracle?
Justin Theroux: My first reaction was "Yay!" because we're going to get out of the places we were shooting in Queens. It did start to feel in the first season that it became kind of oppressively small in that town. And it felt like it was kind of shot out in a way. Obviously, at the end of the first season, Kevin had gotten his wish.
Most shows don't blow themselves up in between the first and second seasons. Could there have been a scenario where everybody stayed in Mapleton?
Damon Lindelof: Absolutely. That was the default position. And this was a very unique experience for me, largely because it was an adaptation. And working with Tom and saying, like, All the things that make this a good novel — in my opinion, a beautiful novel — run sort of counterintuitive to making it an ongoing television series. So how do we take that idea: This actually kind of feels like it's over.
Let's start to talk about what life looks like in Mapleton a week or a year or five years later in the way that, you know, most television dramas would continue, whether it's Desperate Housewives or Friday Night Lights or even Lost. And we started to talk about that, and I started feeling just like, You know what? Maybe we're done. Maybe there shouldn't be a second season of The Leftovers. This is just feeling like we're continuing for a continuation's sake.
And most importantly, what do the characters want? Because in the finale of the first season, all of them are sort of articulating this desire to stop feeling shitty. So what are they going to do about it? What if there is this kind of kitschy town that claims that nobody was departed from there? It's a town of like 400 people, and it's not really that amazing. And then we started talking about what it would be like to live in that place.
And then it was like, What if the Garveys moved there? That seems like it's not just a gimmick, like that's a place that they would gravitate towards. They wouldn't say they were moving there because it was magical, but that's exactly why they're moving there. And it started opening up, and I started getting excited creatively.
JT: There's kind of a — not a separate belief system for the people that live there, but there is a kind of disease of uniqueness. They have their own brand of why they were spared, or why they were special, or what Miracle is. So it was cool just from an audience standpoint to watch those people, and a character standpoint to interact with them. Because the Garveys bring their own set of problems with them.
DL: Yeah, I think that the story that the show wants to tell is that The Sudden Departure is a scapegoat. It's this excuse for people to behave the way that they wanted to behave before it happened. So this idea that Episode 9 in the first season was really all about showing that the Garveys were very fucked up prior to The Departure. And I think that the show is very interested in telling that story now again in Miracle — the best place to tell that story is a place where The Departure didn't happen at all. Sort of like, Are families still fucked up? Yes, they are.
Damon Lindelof and Justin Theroux.
Jeff Kravitz / HBO
Justin, I know that Damon is aware of — even if he doesn't want to be — what critics and viewers are saying about his work. Do you pay attention to those kinds of things?
JT: I was never a — not on purpose — fan of Lost. I didn't watch the entire series. So I didn't come to our show with any preconceived anything. You know, I only based it on sort of what our conversations were, and what he was pitching as a show, and the themes that we were going to explore. If there's a recurring theme that I'm loving this season, it's this sort of extreme agnosticism, or this exploring of belief systems and things like that. I mean, when I first heard just conceptually what The Leftovers was, I was like, Is it a rapture show? Is it one of those weird, crazy Christian books? And of course, three pages in the script, that's dispelled. But it has kind of taken a back door into some of those issues, you know, which I really love. Because to me, that's where sort of the rubber hits the road emotionally for an audience or myself.
DL: I don't want to make private conversations public, but Justin is very aware of my inability — is it an inability? I'll say that I have a proclivity to focus on and seek out negative feedback as a way of balancing the immense kind of blessed life that I have been leading and sort of the idea that I get to do this, period — or that anybody is watching anything that I've done or that I have achieved any level of success. So I feel like I need to tie the figurative cinder block around my ankle in an effort to kind of find some balance, because if I didn't do that, I would just — I'm very scared of what I would become. And Justin has intervened on multiple occasions and said, "That is very toxic, and I used to do that, and you need to stop it."
JT: Through a different spectrum — whatever is out there about you on your life or work. No one really knows Damon or the way his brain works. They know his work. And when you seek out the bully in the high school or when you chain yourself to this idiot avatar, you're inevitably going to get punished for it.
DL: So the name of my production company shouldn't be "Idiot Avatar"? I just registered that domain name. I thought it was so clever.
JT: Damon puts more bricks on his back than he ever should. But when the show is working really, really well, which it does frequently, it's when he's, I can tell, untethered himself from that stuff, and is really exploring the ideas and themes that he wants to do. It operates in its own tempo, like a great jazz record. So if people are willing to sort of watch, not be looking for hooks and poppy lyrics, they're going to be very excited by the show.
And also, live in mystery, you know? Having worked a little with Lynch, it's a different milieu, but it feels the same in that he goes down the channels that he wants to go down, with dream logic or whatever. And certain things aren't explainable. And some things are. You have to tune your ear to it a little bit.
I think Damon's "idiot avatar" is, like, showrunner/creator guy who is sensitive to criticism about Lost — causing him to quit Twitter, and so on. Just to be clear, Justin, is your idiot avatar the story told about you and your life in the gossip press?
JT: Yeah, two totally different things. But you learn within a week — at least I did — like, Oh my god, if you even open that can, you're just going to feel terrible about yourself all day long. Because there's this sort of anonymous democracy that's happening out there, that's anything but. It's more like a swarming dictatorship sometimes.
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"The Leftovers" Changes The Game