Smollett, 32, plays one of the most high-profile gay characters on TV, and this spring he confirmed to Ellen DeGeneres that he is both a real musician (with two tracks on Empire’s soundtrack and a recording contract) and a gay guy in real life. But he’s terrified to reveal any of Jamal’s secrets in the second season, though we know that Jamal has taken over the record company for his imprisoned dad (Terrence Howard), while his mother, Cookie (Henson), also battles for control. “Some of the teams have shifted, and we’ll see what happens,” said Smollett. “[Jamal] has grown a great deal.”
Smollett did say that despite “all the glitz and glamour of showbiz and celebrity, [Empire] very much deals with the issues of the nation and the world that we live in today. It’s a great chance to do something really cool.”
“I think I knew right out of the gate,” he said. “We had that Scandal lead-in, we opened to such a large audience and fans were so passionate on social responding to the pilot. I think right then and there I thought, ‘Wow, we have something here.’”
Falahee said he’s sworn to secrecy about the second season, though he did let a few things slip. “The show picks up right where we left off,” he said. “We find out who killed [neighbor and murder suspect] Rebecca in the first episode back, which is very exciting.” And there’s another development that might come as a surprise, con-sidering that Falahee’s character, Connor Walsh, was seen by the other interns as ruthless and self-centered in the first season. “I think that you start to see the students become friends, which is interesting,” he said.
“It’s really silly and funny this year, more so than last year,” she said. “And I think the show’s a little bit sexier this year, if I do say so myself. They’re just taking more risks with the dynamics between the characters.”
And McPhee, who will also release her new album this fall, encountered that fandom first-hand, she said, when she went on vacation. “The best part was going to Vegas with a group of friends and realizing, ‘Wow, this is a Scorpion town,’” she added with a laugh.
Added Guzman, “I’ll tell you what, this character has been a dream come true for me. I’ve always wanted to play three things. One was a superhero, another was some-body in the armed services, and the third one was a very, very troubled character. And this is all three.”
“I never knew I’d get a chance to work with Jamie Lee Curtis!” said Palmer. “She’s so sweet—she gives this energy where we always feel protected, all the girls do. Emma’s awesome too—I kind of grew up with her in the Disney/Nickelodeon world.”
The show offers more than gore, Palmer insisted. “It has that thriller vibe—but at the same time it is quite funny, so it’s like a Heathers meets Mean Girls.”
What amazed Palmer is the enthusiasm of fans before there was a show to scream for. “[Often] you come off the set and you have a paparazzi shot of myself and the cast. I’ve never been a part of anything that was that anticipated without [fans] having seen any-thing. That was all happening before the trailer! And that’s when I knew, ‘OK, this show is kind of something.’”
“It was the first script I’d read in a long time that wasn’t a clichéd character and was unpredictable,” said Alexander, 31, whose previous work includes playing Thor’s girlfriend and fellow warrior Sif in two features and two episodes of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. “I loved the fact that she’s a well-rounded, well-written female charac-ter who isn’t a superhero.”
Meanwhile, she puts up with the seven hours it takes to apply the full-body tattoos by blasting the Beatles on Pandora, drinking coffee and having good conversations with the crew assigned to cover her with ink. And if she had to persuade somebody who knew nothing about the show to watch it, what would her pitch be? “I’d proba-bly just strip off my clothes and say, ‘You wanna see this every Monday, you just tune into NBC, 10 p.m. after The Voice,’” she said, laughing.
That sounds like a task to overwhelm a writer and comic actress best known for viral videos and standup, but Bloom, 28, hasn’t been daunted by all the adjustments. “I was ecstatic,” she said of the move to The CW. “I really thought the show was dead, and when I heard someone wanted to revive it, and change it in a great way…it’s been a joy.”
Bloom says she and co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna (screenwriter of The Devil Wears Prada) aim to “take the tropes of a romantic comedy and go underneath them” as they explore the title character, who leaves her home to move into the city where her former boyfriend now lives. And they’ll do so with two or three songs in each episode. “The music is the most fun thing to shoot and the most fun thing to write,” she insisted. “It’s hard, but it doesn’t feel like a chore.”
But is his comment a guess or a spoiler about Gina Rodriguez’s Jane Villaneuva, who at the end of the first season had Baldoni’s character’s child via artificial and acci-dental insemination? “Whether it’s this season or next season, I know it’s going to happen,” he said. “I know that this season there’s gonna be a wedding. And we’ve been told that once she gets married, she’s gonna lose her virginity. I just don’t know who it’s going to be with.”
“When you put so much love into something, you don’t know if people are going to respond. But when we got nominated, it was like, ‘Wow, people actually love us.’”
And when did she know the show might catch fire? “It was probably the second day [that] I felt like, ‘Omigosh, this is a special project. We’re actually doing some story telling.’”
“I think we’re sort of reinventing Jimmy Olsen for the 21st century,” said Brooks, whose version of Jimmy also happens to serve as a love interest for Melissa Benoist’s Kara Zor-El, a.k.a. Kara Danvers, a.k.a. Supergirl. “The character was created 75 years ago, and in the societal mentality back then, people were very monochro-matic. But we’re righting a lot of those social inequities from the past.”
He grinned. “It’s a character reimagined. He’s a little more heroic, but I think he’s going to be just as likable.”