Nearly four years after the first season of Nine Perfect Strangers, Nicole Kidman‘s mysterious guru Masha is back for a second season, with a whole new batch of visitors.
This time the show is set in the snowy Alps and Christine Baranski, Henry Golding, Murray Bartlett, Annie Murphy, Mark Strong, King Princess and Dolly de Leon are among those playing the wellness-seekers at Masha’s retreat.
At the show’s Los Angeles premiere on Thursday, Kidman — who also serves as an executive producer — said she didn’t initially plan for there to be a second season, with the first having been based on Liane Moriarty’s book of the same name and the second now “coming out of imagination.”
“The first season we were so shocked at how successful it was, so when Hulu came and said ‘Please, please will you do a second season?’ I was like, ‘Wow, how would we do that?’ And that was how it started,” Kidman told The Hollywood Reporter. “We have one of the best casts in this, and they’re all so good and powerful that it was like OK, balancing all of that and giving everyone their moments and their lanes and differentiating each of the characters.”
One thing that remained the same, though, was Kidman choosing to often stay in character as Masha on set. Executive producer Bruna Papandrea explained how when encountering the new group of actors, “[Kidman] doesn’t meet them before; she enters as Masha meeting them for the first time, which is what she did in the first season. And that’s I think because they’re awaiting that arrival anxiously in both seasons [as their characters], so she does that.”
Bartlett noted, “Certainly when you’re on set, Nicole’s not there, Masha is there, which is kind of thrilling — and scary. Not always, but mostly on set she was in character, which was great for all of us; it kind of puts you in the zone.” Strong recalled how she “sort of wafted in and out. We all, at the end of the shot, would all sit around and chat and she would disappear,” then later would “waft back in like she was some exotic unicorn.”
Golding added that Kidman tried hard to keep in the Masha mindset “in the beginning, but everybody’s too nice and she was like, ‘I kind of want to hang out with these guys’ so she started joining us on the couch and hanging out. But she keeps this mystery around her, and it helps everybody, to be honest with you.”
At a short Q&A following the red carpet, Kidman explained her desire to return to the show despite her jam-packed schedule, telling the crowd, “I actually love playing this character because she’s so powerful, and a lot of the characters that I play are in precarious sort of emotional places. Masha is power and so that’s what’s so appealing — and then also getting to be the puppeteer of this whole group.”
Nine Perfect Strangers starts streaming May 21 on Hulu.
