In Season 2 of the Starz drama seriesCounterpart, the Crossing between parallel dimensions is closed and Howard Prime (J.K. Simmons) is going to work and living his life while his counterpart Howard Alpha (also J.K. Simmons) is locked in a mysterious black site and cut off from everyone he knows, each stranded in the other’s world and adapting for their own survival. As war between the worlds escalates, both men find the lines between them blurring in ways they never would have expected.
At the Los Angeles press day for the new season, Collider got the opportunity to sit down 1-on-1 with show creatorJustin Marksto talk about what he learned from making the first season ofCounterpart, directing an episode of Season 2, what it’s like to be a first-time showrunner, how much of Season 2 was always in the plan, what he knows about the endpoint of the series, adding to the cast, and the show’s female perspective. Be aware that there are some spoilers discussed.
Collider: Since this is the first TV series that you’ve taken on, as a showrunner, did it get any easier for Season 2, or did it provide a whole new set of challenges?
JUSTIN MARKS: It did get easier. I never thought it would, but it did. I wouldn’t say the show makes itself, but the amount of work it took last season, just to know what I was doing, I don’t have to worry about t anymore. It’s also just the typical first season to second season thing that happens with a show. In the first season, you’re busy, throughout the process, with asking, “What is the show?” Well, we know what the show is now. Now, it’s about, how do we execute it as well as we can, and how do we keep the surprises going? There are no questions about tone. There are no questions where an actor says, “Who am I?” There’s none of that stuff. For the incoming cast, we needed to prepare a Bible that said what the show is and what the influences are, but it’s generally gotten a lot easier this year. I actually got eight hours of sleep a few times, and that was nice. The first season, that didn’t happen, at all. This season, I got to direct an episode, try new things that I hadn’t really done before, and take some bigger risks, and I’m very excited about it.
How did that come about? Had you been hoping to direct the show, at some point?
MARKS: It didn’t really come into my mind until the episode was written. It’s a very unique episode that takes place and divides the season in half, and it changes quite a lot about what we know about the show. After it was written, I realized, “I have to direct it. I really want to do it, and I don’t want to let it down by passing it off, and then not communicating well enough to someone else. I want to do it myself.” I was very reluctant, at the beginning. I never would have believed, a year ago, that I would’ve done it, but I fell in love with it, on the page.
Now that you’ve done it, do you want to do it again? Do you want to direct more episodes, or direct an entirely different project?
MARKS: I would. I would never default to it. It always has to be coming off of the page, like falling in love with something. I’m a writer, and I feel like my best strength, as a director, is as a writer. If I write something that I truly fall in love with again, then I’ll do it again, and if not, I am happy that we have very, very competent and excellent directors on the show, especially this season.
Would that be the same with a film?
MARKS: Yes. I would consider it. It would be fun. But, I wouldn’t just show up and direct. I would have to find something where I truly felt that I had something better to add than the next person. Like a TV show, it really is a marriage, and you may’t get into a marriage lightly. It’s tough.
What is the experience of being a showrunner like? On day one, did you know that it was what you were supposed to be doing, or did you have moments of panic?
MARKS: I had total moments of panic, all the time. It’s sink or swim, and fortunately, I had a lot of great people to teach me. I had Amy Berg on Season 1. Erin Levy, who’s #2 on the show, is really experienced fromMad Men. We have great producers, line producers, directors, and people who have done it before, and you really listen to them and attempt to learn. It’s not for everyone, but if it’s for you, it’s really fun. My background is in architecture. I love drawing and designing worlds, and all that stuff, so it really suited me very nicely, when it came to getting to build the look and feel of the show. Actually looking over my shoulder and realizing, “Oh, I’m the one in charge,” is crazy. You’re accountable to almost no one, and that’s really fun. You don’t get that in features.
How much of what we’re seeing in Season 2 is what you thought this season would be, when you first developed this TV series?
MARKS: I’d say a perfect 50%, which if we’re doing our jobs, it should be, every season. We always ruminate on and talk about what the show should be, in the future in the writers’ room. We set goals – goals for revealing the twists that we’ve always had in our heads, or a character moment, or who this person or that person is – but then, there’s this other 50%, that is the unknown. That’s what you find, along the way, that really pulls you in a different direction and guides you in a different way. That’s the stuff that makes for the best part of the show. That’s the stuff that made for Clare and her reveal in Season 1, or Baldwin and the fact that she even survived it. Those are the things that you find by accident, as writers, as you go through it. So, it’s always about being open to that other 50%. We have a lot of stuff that we knew was coming, and some more information, reveals and plotlines about characters that we were really hoping to see, but then there’s this other stuff that we just figured out, on the way, that have really became some of the best parts of the season.
Do you know what the endpoint of your story is, and you’re just figuring out how to get there?
MARKS: Yeah. It’s the same exact principle. The only thing that I know about the endpoint of the series is the final image of the series. I don’t know what the image means, and I don’t know who that is, in that final image, except to say that I know what the image alludes to and is about. That’s what we’re always writing towards and pushing towards. How we get there is what the show is, and that should always surprise us, as much as possible.
Have you thought about how long it will take you to get there?
MARKS: No, not really. I like the philosophy where it’s like a movie, and you just keep doing sequels until, one day, someone tells you that there are no more sequels, so you wrap it up. Because we have a very rubber band-y structure of identity, and of people coming and going into certain versions, as they find their center, that journey that all of these characters will take is very elliptical.
You have such an interesting cast of characters on this show, and actors who are all so talented. How did you figure out what new characters to add, and what actors would fit in, among all of that?
MARKS: We always had in mind who Temple would be. We didn’t know it would be Betty Gabriel playing that role. That was a dream. But, the idea of this character who comes in from the outside was always the notion. We knew we were going to lose Aldrich in the first season, and then bring Temple into his role. Likewise, for the role that Jamie Cromwell plays, Yanek, we’ve had that character in our heads, since the very beginning of the writers’ room, for reasons that I won’t go into. Mira, who Christiane Paul plays, is another example. We meet her briefly in the first season, in Episodes 7 and 8, as the head of the Indigo School. Those are all characters that it feels like, as the story grows, are different windows into the same house. There’s something fun to letting certain characters grow on you, in ways that you didn’t think. Quayle is a great example of that, where it’s this perfect confluence interaction of material and actor, yielding something greater than both could’ve created on their own, so we’ll follow that scent a lot. But mostly, it’s just in the spirit of, how do we create a counterpoint to the previous season? If the previous season was about some of the failings of the old boys network in the old Cold War style espionage that Quayle thrived within and that Aldrich fell prey to, then Season 2 is now about introducing an outsider into that world, who is not gonna fall prey to those trappings, and that’s who Temple is. Suddenly, Quayle can’t just rely on being a good-looking guy who plays the part. He’s got some other challenges in front of him.
I really love the female perspective on this show because these characters are all such strong, smart, complex women who are really both protagonists and antagonists, depending on who they’re interacting with. Is that something that you’ve thought a lot about?
MARKS: It has been. We have a predominantly female writers’ room onCounterpart. From the straight white male perspective, a lot of it really is just that these are stories that I don’t innately tell, so it makes my job easier, if I let other people tell them, and they’re really great at writing these kinds of stories and creating these kinds of characters. So, to embrace that, just frankly means that it’s less writing for me to do, and it makes it much better for me, as an audience member watching the show, to see characters like Clare, Baldwin or Emily thrive, or the addition of Temple or Mira. In the first episode of this show, the only female character really was someone lying in a hospital bed, and now we’re at a point where J.K., Nicholas [Pinnock] and Harry [Lloyd] are all looking around like, “Where did all the dudes on this show go?” It’s such trying to fly the kite in the wind. I’m really happy with the direction that it’s taken. Wait until you see where they go, in the second season. We always knew that Season 2 was about the Emily we never knew, and there are a lot of surprises yet to come with that. We really wanted it to be Olivia Williams’ season, in a lot of ways, and it really is.
