Clear The Runway For Multiple Cassies in Season 2 of THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT, Says Star and EP Kaley Cuoco

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede It’s time for Kaley Cuoco to count the Cassies in Season 2 of THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT. During a virtual roundtable interview to promote the HBO Max series, which returns with two new episodes Thursday, April 21 on Crave and CTV Drama Channel, Cuoco said, “we took big swings this season, you know, I play five Cassies, so that’s definitely upping the ante.” Anyone who saw Season 1 remembers that Cuoco stars as lead character Cassie Bowden, and there’s a “mind palace” element to the show – that’s Cuoco’s term – which plays out in Cassie’s head. So if the Season 2 “mind palace” is populated by “five Cassies,” can Cuoco name them all? “Oh yeah, I sure can,” Cuoco replied with infectious enthusiasm. “Let’s see, we’ve got regular Cassie, gold-dress Cassie, black-sweater Cassie, future-perfect Cassie, and nihilist Cassie. Wait a second, is that six? How many did I just count? Did I just count six? Hold on, wait, let’s do that again. Regular Cassie, black sweater, nihilist, gold dress, future perfect. Did I miss someone else? That’s five. Okay, we learned how to count on this episode of ‘Kaley learning how to count.’ So yes, there was a lot of Cassie. It felt like 30, so there.” Speaking of counting, how much Cassie can be counted on by her friends and colleagues is a big question in Season 2 of THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT. She seems to have it together as the season begins, living in the so-called “pink cloud” of substance-abuse recovery. She’s attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, she’s in a new city, she has a new boyfriend (played by Santiago Cabrera, who also plays Rios on CTV Sci-Fi Channel’s STAR TREK: PICARD), and her side gig as a CIA asset is adding some excitement to her life. But there’s a lot going on under the surface. Cuoco said that one of her main jobs as an executive producer has been to remind everyone to insert a degree of lightness into the proceedings – she described Season 1 as having a “unique levity” – while acknowledging that Season 2 gets pretty heavy as it progresses. “I wanted to obviously keep the comedy side alive, and what was very important to that was the mind palace,” said Cuoco, who played Penny on the long-running sitcom THE BIG BANG THEORY (available on Crave). “The mind palace was what made our show different last season, and we wanted to keep that, but we were unsure how to do it. We were like, well, who’s she gonna meet in there? At one point gold-dress Cassie even says, ‘did you think you’re going to meet another hot dead guy in here?’ ” The hot dead guy in Season 1, by the way, was played by Michiel Huisman. So it was decided that in Season 2, Cassie would encounter different versions of herself in the mind palace. But of course, that was a complex thing to pull off. “It’s a big plot point, and a way for the audience to get inside her mind, a great tool – but also crazy to shoot,” Cuoco said. “Our team actually spoke a lot to the team that shot ORPHAN BLACK (also on Crave, with Tatiana Maslany playing multiple characters). A lot of those people helped with our process, because they had very similar storylines, and used the same cameras and all this stuff. It was a pretty wild experience.” Many of the crucial characters from Cassie’s world in Season 1 are back for Season 2 in various circumstances, including Annie (Zosia Mamet), Megan (Rosie Perez), Shane (Griffin Matthews), Max (Deniz Akdeniz), Davey (T.R. Knight), and Miranda (Michelle Gomez). Vital new characters are played by Mo McRae, Callie Hernandez, Joseph Julian Soria, and legendary EMMY® winner and OSCAR® nominee Sharon Stone, who makes a memorable impact when she joins the fray as Cassie’s mother later in the season. When asked what she enjoys most about playing Cassie in THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT, Cuoco replied, “she just does insane stuff, and she makes insane choices where you’re like, ‘whoa!’ And apparently she can’t count, so that’s funny.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv