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Wolf Like Me Creators Break Down Season 2's Blood, Beats, and Baby Issues
Wolf Like Me creators Abe Forsythe and Jodi Matterson break down the first two episodes of Season 2, including that bloody wedding and the floating fetus.
This story contains spoilers for Wolf Like Me Season 2, Episodes 1 and 2.
After an 18-month hiatus between seasons, the sophomore season premiere of Peacock's Wolf Like Me opens up with an audaciously brazen and gory burst of demon craziness that reminds us why we love this horror/rom-com. Picking up many weeks into Mary's (Isla Fisher) pregnancy, she's flop sweating over what she and Gary (Josh Gad) might be having (a baby or a wolf up?) while they're renovating a new home with a wolf-proof basement to keep her from the family during her moon madness.
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Executive producers/creators Abe Forsythe and Jodi Matterson walk SYFY WIRE through the first two episodes, which are rife with scenes including nightmare demon babies, intimate moments of connection between the characters, even more amazing needle drops than Season 1, and an internal home invasion episode that ups the stakes for Gary, Mary, and their baby.
Episode 1: The Next Red Wedding
Season 2 opens with Mary dreaming of a beautiful outdoor wedding, where she makes her very pregnant way up to Gary and his daughter Emma (Ariel Donoghue) to exchange vows. But in a moment straight out of Alien, Mary's baby bump ruptures and sprays the whole wedding party in blood as a terrifying demon baby crawls out and tries to kill Gary. Goodbye dream wedding and hello nightmare!
Executive producer Jodi Matterson said the shooting of that sequence was the most fun they had in Season 2. "It was absolutely hysterical, where you have our lead characters and all of these extras and then the chaos ensues," she said, laughing. "I can't tell you how many liters of blood we went through on that day. Also, when you have a cast of over 100 people in white and that amount of blood, with all the different implements they used to get that blood to the people, that was a pretty fun day."
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Plus, they had to shoot it multiple times for all of the coverage, which meant an arsenal of wedding dresses that were swapped out once they were blood-soaked. "Odd, our creature and special effects company, created that demon creature for that gag and it really was extraordinary," she said. "It just worked so brilliantly. We were so pleased that's the way that gag turned out."
The Season 2 Soundtrack
As established in Season 1 of Wolf Like Me, music plays a vital role in how Mary's story is told. She bonds with Emma over it, and songs that she listens to are often woven into the diegetic sounds of any given episode.
"We push the music so much more in Season 2," Forsythe said of his ambition toward music this year. "There was a lot, but I really made our music supervisor work his ass off to be able to clear everything this season. There's 'Here Comes the Sun' wth two different versions that we hear that. We were clearing Nina Simone, George Harrison, and a Paul McCartney track too. There's Melody Gardot, so he really had his work cut out for him."
Forsythe is clear that the song choices aren't just random, but that he treated them as thematic Easter eggs to support the character arcs. " If people listen to the songs in relation to what the characters are going through, there's more meaning that can be taken from them," he shared. "I could see how people responded to the songs in Season 1, so I really wanted to push this further with Season 2."
One of his favorite scenes featured a very specific song: In the opening episode, Mary takes Emma to the beach so they can discuss how the teen is feeling about starting high school.
"With Emma quoting that Queens of the Stone Age reference ('Go with the Flow'), it makes Mary realize that she gave this [band and their music] to her, and Emma took it further," he explained. "This is a great thing for Emma to give back to Mary and a great counter moment. And it's such a full-on song, and not an appropriate song for the moment ... But it is because it makes a deeper intimate moment between the two of them as this amazing loud music is playing alongside them."
Mary's Wolf-Mothering Kicks In and Sets Up Season 2
In the final third of the episode, Mary's fretting about what the baby is, and what kind of mother she will be gets answered when she has to defend Emma at her school from a bully. Without even thinking, she defends Emma with such ferocity that it deepens their bond — and serves as proof that she's worthy of being a mom.
"The scene at the school with the mother telling off the mother was so much fun to shoot," Forsythe said. "It's Mary's protective, wolf-mothering kicking into gear without her even realizing it. And it's after that, that she's able to go, Alright, I am already the thing that I'm scared of being.'"
Much calmer, she then rocks her baby to sleep with the headphones resting on her tummy, and the audience is given a surprise first look at the fetus growing, glowing, and softly jamming to Dolly Parton.
"That was one of the trickiest things that we had to achieve this season," Forsythe said of the CGI shot. "It's weird because it's not fully realistic. But it's realistic enough and fantastical enough with a Dolly Parton song because of the emotion of it.
"We were going for something that was more emotionally truthful rather than scientifically accurate and truthful," he continued. "To be honest, it's as much the VFX as that Dolly Parton playing on top of it which allows us to experience the moment emotionally and for us to feel connected to Mary at that time. Mary is now actually in acceptance of what she's growing inside of her, and that she is going to be a great mother because she's already a great stepmother to Emma. And so, Episode 1 was designed to be a self-contained movie about Mary accepting who she is."
Episode 2 - Mary's Wolf Haunts Her Own House
If Episode 1 was Mary coming to terms with her mothering potential, Episode 2 is all about Gary getting an an unfiltered taste of just how dangerous Mary the wolf can be when she escapes what is supposed to be their impenetrable basement holding cell.
Forsythe said they built the entire floor plan of Mary and Gary's new home just for this episode.
"The interior is all designed and built by our production designer Loretta Cosgrove," he detailed. "She and I mapped out — with our directory of photography, Matt Toll — the whole house, so that anytime you are in the house throughout the season, we will never repeat areas. We designed the entire place so it could gradually reveal the wolf throughout that sequence in a way that was satisfying and shocking and surprising."
RELATED: Exclusive: Watch Mary's Wolf Stalk Gary in Season 2 of Peacock's Wolf Like Me
All seven episodes of Wolf Like Me Season 2 are streaming exclusively now on Peacock.
