After a season finale that blew open the door on some pending stresses ahead for Woodstone Mansion’s Livings, Sam and Jay in Season 2 — played by Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar, respectively — Ghosts will be back this fall on CBS with a storyline the showrunners teased would be a bit tenser. In a PopCulture.com exclusive this past April, Joe Port and Joe Wiseman revealed the sophomore season of the smash-hit sitcom would chronicle the ups and downs of a couple’s struggling business as they work to get it up on its feet.
With Sam and Jay feeling the pressure, series star Rebecca Wisocky who portrays Woodstone matriarch Hetty tells PopCulture.com her character will no doubt be there for her great-great-great-granddaughter. Not to mention, she asserts how that dynamic will surely open up more about her elusive matriarchal figure. “I’ve loved exploring that relationship,” Wisocky told PopCulture of the maternal relationship the pair have. “Rose, and I have become close in real life as well, as have all of the ladies, especially. But I think that I want to know what Hetty’s relationship with her own children if she had any was. I think she’s got a lot of mistakes and like I said, regrets about how she lived her life and her interaction with her own potential daughter — maybe we don’t know whether or not she had one!”
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Wisocky adds that the “slow burn, maternal surrogacy” developing with Sam has been “very fun and very rewarding” for the two actresses. “I think that will continue, Rose and I both enjoyed playing it. We’ve convinced ourselves that we’re looking more and more like we’re related, which really flattering to me if nothing more. But yeah, I think Hetty will continue to be the surrogate mother figure to Samantha.”
With the pair almost being “puzzle pieces” to one another and a mystery surrounding their own backstories, there are elements assumed that have not yet been spoken that evoke stronger dialogue for character development as seen in the episode, “Alberta’s Fan” where she and Thorfinn (Devan Chandler Long) connect based on a past memory. “[Even] in her own childhood, when you see the flashback with Thorfinn as her imaginary friend singing her lullabies and by her own admission, she says this imaginary friend, that Thorfinn was the only person that ever really took care of her in her life,” she said. “So she clearly had an icy relationship with her own parents and had a kind of loveless childhood and a loveless marriage. And so in some ways, you can’t really blame her for being so slow to catch up to modern ways.”
Praising the show for its ability to connect all of the characters as one “organism,” Wisocky heralds the writing for constructing “multiple meanings and multiple avenues” to elevate the storytelling, whether it be for her own character or a co-star’s. Sharing how she is always blown away by how creative the writers get with the characters’ arcs, Wisocky says she was surprised with Flower’s backstory, in which it was discovered she was a basketball expert and fan. “[It] was not only a surprising juicy tidbit, [but] it also happens to be true in real life. And [the writers] had no idea. Their finger is really on the pulse of what the primary color of each of these actors is as well,” she said. “But it also was able to fracture and tie together, the guy who is the nicest guy on the show, Pete was actually behaved in a very sexist manner towards her, which was also very typical possibly of his own time period and shortcoming of that time period.”
Wisocky continues that the idea of being “puzzle pieces” is one of the most appealing parts of the series. “They have something to learn from one another and it’s a motley crew that would’ve never intersected in real life and only in knowing one another, are they capable of being open to change — are they capable of understanding that they might have a change to make, and that’s something that’s endlessly fascinating.”
For more on Ghosts and Rebecca Wisocky, stay tuned to the very latest about the show, news about the cast, and everything in between only on PopCulture. In the meantime, relive the first season of Ghosts on Paramount for free from June 3 to Sept. 2, 2022.
