Who Is Amanda? Alice Braga Explains Jason’s Psychologist Love Interest

Apple TV+’s latest sci-fi thriller Dark Matter already has us gripping the edge of our seats just two episodes in, but there are still plenty of questions to be answered. Like, how will Jason 1 (Joel Edgerton) return home to his loving wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), who is living unaware of her husband’s departure to an entirely different dimension? Why did Jason 2 (also Edgerton) kidnap Jason 1 and send him back to his alt-reality? How do all the other players at Velocity Labs tie into the nefarious scientific happenings going down at the R&D corp? And when will we finally see the show use Jason 2’s invention, a 12×12 metal box that hops between dimensions? The answer to that last question is: Very soon.

In the drama’s third episode, titled “The Box,” we’ll get our first good look at the cube in question and just how it works, but we also learn quite a bit more about Dr. Amanda Lucas (Suicide Squad star Alice Braga), who has spent the last two episodes trailing Jason 1 trying to get him to remember who he isn’t.ee

“Every email I get about Dark Matter is inevitably about Amanda, and what happened to Amanda [in the book],” says Blake Crouch, Dark Matter’s showrunner/exec producer and writer of the original 2016 bestselling novel.

The pivotal character in question works at Velocity Labs, specializing in psychological profiling and training brave folks planning to go into the box. She was also in a fairly serious relationship (they were living together!) with Jason who invented the box, but later abandons his dimension to infiltrate Jason 1’s family-focused life. “She’s also Jason’s initial guide through the multiverse once they get into the box because Amanda is the one who knows a little bit more about how it works. She also understands that our minds create reality, and some of the pitfalls and dangers inherent in that [knowledge],” the EP teases.

Naturally, Amanda and Jason 1 develop a complicated relationship that turns towards romance. “There’s some crazy chemistry between them,” Crouch says.

“For Amanda, she falls in love with both Jasons for [different] reasons,” Braga explains. “She comes in dealing with Jason 1 as if he was her Jason because she knows so much about his past, his life, his childhood, which is the same as this new version. But she can easily see how much of the choices that the Jason that she’s facing have changed him into a more emotional and empathetic human being. And of course, she starts falling for that. And through that connection, I think they start trusting each other.”

Jason 1 and Amanda begin their multiverse travels in this upcoming hour, and it’s not only going to be a very harrowing journey for them, but it’ll also be eye-opening, as they step into wildly different worlds in search of Jason 1’s original home. “They’re put into these extremely emotional, emotionally-driven situations [and] they start bonding, not only to survive but to try to find [Jason 1’s] family.”

But it isn’t all about Jason. The world-hopping will affect Amanda quite a bit as well. Says Braga: “Through their journey of going to different universes and seeing different possibilities of her own life, I think Amanda finds her own destiny.”

Dark Matter, Wednesdays, Apple TV+