Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Oliver Jackson-Cohen are diving in deep when it comes to their “juicy, twisty” new show Surface, making its debut on Apple TV+ Friday. Ahead of the premiere of the Reese Witherspoon-produced psychological thriller, which stars the Loki actress as a woman suffering severe memory loss after what she’s told was a suicide attempt, Mbatha-Raw and Jackson-Cohen opened up to PopCulture.com about what happens when you can’t trust even your own memory.
Mbatha-Raw, who stars as Sophie and also serves as executive producer on the series, said she jumped at the chance to work with Witherspoon’s production company Hello Sunshine after an “amazing experience” on The Morning Show and their reputation for “very complex, interesting female roles.” She continued, “And then I read the script by [showrunner Veronica West], and it was just such a juicy, twisty, psychological thriller told from a female perspective, which I hadn’t seen before, and I was completely drawn in by the first episode.”
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Jackson-Cohen, who plays Sophie’s husband James, was also hooked right off the bat by the idea of playing such an ambiguous character. “Specifically, it’s such an interesting dynamic when your lead character doesn’t know anything, and the husband, your secondary lead knows everything,” he said. “So that creates such incredible tension of two people living [and] I think, speaks of marriages and relationships, two people living in the same house, but basically on their own, on their own islands.”
Jackson-Cohen hinted that Surface is all about the “lies that we tell and the secrets that we keep,” a dynamic that created ample tension for him to play off with Mbatha-Raw. “Gugu is incredible,” he gushed of his on-screen wife. “So it was just a joy to… we would sit and talk and work through stuff.”
Showrunner West also had nothing but praise for Mbatha-Raw. “It’s really just dream casting to have Gugu on board. She is such a true artist and I think the world is going to be very excited to see her embody, not just the Sophie that we meet in the pilot, but all the different sides of Sophie as the series continues,” she told PopCulture. Surface, also starring Stephan James, Ari Graynor, Marianne Jean Baptiste, Millie Brady and Francois Arnaud, premieres Friday, July 29 on Apple TV+ with the first three episodes. The remaining five episodes will premiere weekly every Friday, with the series finale airing on Sept. 2.
