For Season 2 of the HBO Max anthology series “Love Life,” the obvious challenge was creating a believable love story that could stand up to the show’s first season. But that challenge was made simple by the undeniable chemistry of its leads, William Jackson Harper, who plays book editor Marcus Watkins, and Jessica Williams, as the object of his desire, Mia Hines.
In conversation with Variety senior entertainment writer Angelique Jackson for the Variety Streaming Room, the actors joined Season 2 narrator Keith David, creator-showrunner-director Sam Boyd and showrunners and writers Bridget Bedard and Rachelle Williams-BenAry to discuss the challenges of crafting an authentic romance. In particular, Bedard said that one scene near the end of the season, where the two co-stars walk through the streets of New York, was one of the most obvious signs to her that the story was believable.
“That was something that the network kept saying, ‘This is so boring. Cut that, cut that, cut that.’ And I just kept saying, ‘It’s gonna be fine. I’m not worried at all,'” Bedard said. “It’s one of my favorite sequences because of the chemistry; you just want to watch them. The story doesn’t even need to move forward because the story is there, falling in love.”
Williams-BenAry also praised the work of Harper and Williams, saying that she gathered inspiration for her script from their performances in the filming of the first episode, at which point only half the season had been written.
“I’m just glad we waited to see that, because I think writers can sometimes [say], ‘All our 10 episodes are written. Let’s go shoot it, and I don’t want to change anything because everything’s mapped out and planned out,” Williams-BenAry explained. “But you find richer material when you get to see the actors do their thing.”
Harper, who is also an executive producer on the series, saluted the work of the show’s writers, saying that he had never seen a script that created a character as multi-faceted as Marcus, who is exploring his identity as a Black man while simultaneously searching for love. “Love Life” introduces Marcus by dropping into the intricacies of his Blackness and how his identity influences how he moves in certain situations and relationships, without over-explaining them.
“To jump right into the things that I’m thinking about and the way that I feel about things and to just trust that the audience is gonna come along and understand it and identify was really unique to me,” Harper said. “That’s something that this writers’ room really accentuated beautifully.”
Williams was likewise attracted to the nuance with which this Black woman’s story was presented, noting the complexity and depth that she saw in the scripts.
“I liked that from the first episode you see that she’s this person that you know on a surface level,” she said. “I was really interested in her growth and exploring her depth as the season changed and that shift in how we understood Mia.”
Williams said that it was a “no-brainer” to sign on for the part because of what the series adds to the romcom genre canon as a whole.
“It’s really important to me to play women of color that can also be objects of desire and romantic interest,” she added. “It’s really important to change the narrative and perspective about the way that we see Black women and people of color, to see us in something that traditionally would’ve been a part originally considered more for a white woman.”
Watch the full conversation in the video above.
