In Shadow and Bone’s Season 1 finale, Kaz made a deal with Alina to conceal her identity as the Sun Summoner in exchange for the queen’s jewels, which he planned to use to free Inej.
When we meet the Crows back in Ketterdam at the start of Season 2 — premiering next Thursday, March 16 on Netflix — our motley heroes quickly realize that their home was stolen from them, and they have nothing left.
“The rug was really pulled out from underneath us, and for Kaz, that brings up all kinds of stuff from his childhood,” Freddy Carter, who plays Kaz, tells TVLine. “He’s been battling this internal thing and an external thing. Because he’s not good at talking to other people about what’s going on inside of him, that battle ramps up and then sort of consumes him.”
Inej, meanwhile, will grapple with her faith in the new season. “She’s been dealt a lot of awful things, and she hasn’t managed to lose faith yet, but that hope [is] slowly withering away, and it’s taking a little bit of her away as well,” Amita Suman teases. “It makes her something unexpected at the end of the season.”
For Jesper, who lives for the next adventure and being seen as a hero, Season 2 forces him to “engage with something a little bit deeper this season because his trust is somewhat broken by decisions that his friends make, and that they don’t include him in their decision making,” Kit Young says. The sharpshooter will seek out “new relationships” that “unravel a lot about himself.”
Shadow and Bone’s upcoming season will also introduce a bevy of new characters, including Wylan Hendricks (played by The Witcher’s Jack Wolfe) and Nikolai Lantsov (The OA’s Patrick Gibson), the youngest Ravkan prince who sails around the world as a privateer named Sturmhond.
For Wolfe, portraying a fan favorite comes with the pressure of “becoming the person to decide how this book character breathes or talks, what the accent is, how they interact with people — especially how they interact with people who they don’t interact with in the books.”
In Season 2, Wylan will interact with “people and places and situations that exist in the Grishaverse but not directly in his arc in the book,” Wolfe previews. And while his appearance will deviate from the books, the actor notes that he “really tried to take as much as I can from the material that’s already there and apply the things that people like about Wylan, what I like about Wylan.”
As for Nikolai, Gibson notes that he also felt the pressure of getting his portrayal right. “When you’ve got a character that is known, especially when it’s in a book because really have their own idea of the character, I felt like it was a responsibility to do it justice,” he shares.
