Interview: Katherine Parkinson, Lisa McGrillis, Emily Atack & Oliver Chris on ‘Rivals’ Season 2
Has there been a more thrilling, unapologetically delicious return to form on television this year than Rivals season 2? An era-defining smash hit upon its release in October 2024, the Disney+/Hulu adaptation of the late, beloved Dame Jilly Cooper‘s 1988 bestselling “bonkbuster” of the same name returned to screens this past May for its long-awaited sophomore season, only this time bigger, bolder, and more delightfully unhinged than ever before. Expanded to a generous 12 episodes (up from eight) and split into two six-part installments — the first of which wrapped on June 5, with the second arriving on Disney+ and Hulu this coming November — Season 2 is a richer, more nuanced, and more emotionally devastating descent into the booze-soaked, ambition-poisoned dysfunction of Cooper’s beloved Rutshire ensemble, picking up shortly after the explosive cliffhanger that closed out Season 1.
Returning to the cast are series stars David Tennant (as the deliciously villainous Tony Baddingham), Alex Hassell (as the irresistible Rupert Campbell-Black), Aidan Turner (as the firebrand Declan O’Hara), Bella Maclean (as Taggie), Nafessa Williams (as Cameron Cook), and Danny Dyer (as the salt-of-the-earth Freddie Jones), as well as Katherine Parkinson, Lisa McGrillis, Emily Atack, and Oliver Chris, who anchor much of the show’s deliciously messy marital underbelly as Lizzie Vereker, Valerie Jones, Sarah Stratton, and James Vereker, respectively. They’re joined this season by a stacked roster of new guest stars including Hayley Atwell and Rupert Everett as Rupert Campbell-Black’s ex-wife and her current husband, alongside Maxim Ays, Oliver Dench, Eliot Salt, and Jonny Weldon.
If Season 1 of Rivals was the heady, lust-fuelled rush of first attraction, then Season 2 is the morning after, its quartet of central marriages buckling under the weight of ambition, deception, and the slow-burning consequences of choices made far too rashly. For McGrillis, who reprises her role as the social-climbing Valerie, the much larger episode count was instrumental in allowing the show’s tangled ensemble web to truly breathe. “It was funny, you do a lot of jobs and you really are desperately hopeful that they’ll be good. But in the first series, there was definitely a fizzy energy,” she recalls. “We were all kind of like, this feels like — really, the quality, the scripts are brilliant. It just felt quite special when we were doing it. But we had no clue how it was gonna go.”
“I think that you’re going to be really satisfied. What they’ve done so seamlessly with these scripts, we’ve got 12 episodes this time, which has just really allowed loads of space for all the different storylines to unfold so brilliantly,” she continues. “They’re also detailed and nuanced, and everybody, I feel, in this series has their moment.”
That added breathing room also allows for some bold new departures from Cooper’s source material, with the show’s writers room weaving in entirely original twists and surprises that even the most devoted readers of the novel may not see coming. “It’s exciting. And there are some big surprises in it that haven’t come from the book,” teases Parkinson, whose Lizzie was last seen tumbling headfirst into an affair with Freddie at the close of Season 1. “I think it will be full of twists and turns and unexpected events as well, which will hopefully be very thrilling.”
At the heart of Season 2 is a quietly piercing meditation on the politics of marriage in 1980s Britain and the ways in which the institution functioned as both refuge and trap, especially for women without the financial means to walk away. While both Parkinson’s Lizzie and McGrillis’ Valerie initially appear to occupy radically different worlds, Lizzie shackled to the vain, emotionally vacant James Vereker; Valerie blissfully ascending the social ladder on Freddie’s arm, Season 2 slowly reveals just how much the two women have in common, each trapped in her own loveless union for reasons that have everything to do with class, gender, and survival.
“I think for Valerie, when we see her again at the beginning of Series 2, she’s just blissfully unaware of anything going on. I don’t think she would ever imagine that Freddie would have an affair with anybody else, so she’s very much just continuing with her social climbing,” explains McGrillis of her character’s initial position at the start of the season. “But as the series unfolds, the audience will see a much more vulnerable side to her, and they will understand why she is the way she is, and why she has allowed her relationship with Freddie to… well, for the spark to have died. Underneath, you just have a much more of an understanding of why she is the way she is. It was a really lovely nuanced journey to go on with her, actually.”
For Parkinson’s Lizzie, meanwhile, Season 2 sees the romantic novelist begin to step into her own, both creatively and financially, as her clandestine affair with Freddie awakens something in her she didn’t quite realise she’d lost. “I think Lizzie has journeyed too. She’s sort of basking in the glory of this love for Freddie, but quickly sees what’s at stake, particularly with his wife and children. In a way, their marriage has got more going for it than Lizzie’s marriage,” reflects Parkinson. “But you see her become financially independent — and then more independent generally — and then she makes a choice to maybe dare to do what she should have done many moons ago.”
For Parkinson, what makes the season so richly compelling is the way it interrogates the very institution of marriage itself, holding up a deliberate, almost generational mirror to the suffocating expectations placed on women in the 1980s and quietly asking just how much, in some respects, has actually changed. “It’s all to do with the context of the time,” she muses. “I was watching the BBC Pride and Prejudice with my daughters recently, and sort of trying to explain to them the stakes for young women getting married back in those days. The ’80s isn’t as distant in the past, but it was similar in that, if you weren’t financially independent, you were maybe more trapped in a bad marriage than you would be, hopefully, today. So I think it’s a way of looking back at the ’80s, and then missing some things — but also realising how much better things have got for women.”
If Lizzie and Valerie are the season’s quietly aching emotional anchors, then Sarah and James are undoubtedly its most blisteringly combustible. Reuniting briefly at the start of the season after their incendiary Season 1 affair, Atack’s Sarah (now married to deputy minister Paul Stratton and expecting his child) and Chris’ James Vereker (Lizzie’s smarmy, image-obsessed husband) embody two of the show’s most fascinating studies of ambition, desire, and the wreckage left in the wake of selfish living. For Chris, who has been involved with Rivals since its earliest days, the joy of returning to the show is inseparable from the late Cooper’s enduring spirit. “The source material is epic — certainly in the UK, it’s part of our cultural makeup. To create something to capture the joy of that with this extraordinary creative technical team and the cast, it was built with such a joy bubble,” he gushes. “Jilly Cooper builds a joy bubble and operates inside a joy bubble. And when you give something with all of your heart, what goes from the heart goes to the heart. When it’s so full of this brash, 80s, sweet-and-salty, passionate, betrayal-filled, love-filled, vulnerability-filled, social-satirical stuff — you just hope it’s going to be received with the joy it’s given. And it is just such a delight and a privilege to see that it’s hit people’s hearts.”
For Atack, who returns as the sharp-tongued, fiercely ambitious Sarah, Season 2 finds her character at a very different crossroads from where we last left her. Pregnant with Paul Stratton’s child and reckoning with the messy consequences of her Season 1 escapades, Sarah’s arc this time around is one of slow, quiet recalibration — though, as Atack is quick to note, never quite at the expense of her edge. “Sarah has her sights set on very different things,” she explains. “Before, it was all about sleeping her way to the top, using her sexuality to get the things that she wants, and I think this time around, it’s different. She’s really looking for that security and she’s trying to make her life work and she’s trying to make it better. But obviously all these awful things that she did in Series One, they catch up with her.”
“I’ve been so lucky with how they’ve written her this series. I’ve got so many lovely things to do, and it really looks at her relationship with Paul Stratton — that marriage. You get a little glimpse, a little bit more in detail, of why she is with Paul,” she continues. “Because in the beginning, you’re a bit like, well, what is she doing, she’s repulsed by him — but you sort of learn that there’s a deeper kind of connection there.”
That added complexity, Atack notes, is part of what makes Sarah such a complicated character to root for — a woman whose questionable choices are ultimately rooted in a much deeper, painfully recognisable hunger for love and stability. “I think as a mother, that’s what you do. She’s got a child to look after, and I think she desperately does want that family. I think she wants to be loved,” she reflects. “Yeah, she’s got her sights set on other things, but I still think somewhere down the line — and I don’t know this — but I think somewhere down the line she will throw her morals out the window at some point to just get the things that she needs. She wants to survive in this male-dominated world where she’s been treated very badly.”
If Sarah’s Season 2 trajectory is one of slow growth, then James Vereker’s is something far darker. Played by Chris with deliciously vain, casually cruel charm in Season 1, James returns this time around with the comic gloss of his casual unpleasantness slowly curdling into something genuinely insidious — a transformation that Chris admits caught him off guard as he watched the season come together. “I think James in Series 1 occupies that quite comic space as a kind of ghastly, vain, self-obsessed, emotionally careless individual with no room to love anybody else than himself. That’s used to comic effect in the first series, and it’s completely delightful. I mean, I always wanted to be a bad guy — who wouldn’t want to spend their days exercising the most unpleasant parts of themselves in a safe space?” he says.
“But in Season 2, we start to see the effects of that emotional carelessness and disregard on other characters, and what once was funny — like waltz music gone discordant — doesn’t feel so funny anymore. There are some really unpleasant consequences to James’s behaviour,” he continues. “I was quite shocked, because I really enjoy playing the character. I love exercising those gross bits in a safe space. When do you ever get to do that in real life? Thank God. But watching this, I was actually quite affected by it, because seeing it all in context, seeing it all up on the screen, you realise how much that careless, selfish behaviour affects other people. To realise that what I was doing was not really funny — it was actually representing a kind of slightly insipid, passive, selfish, toxic masculinity, which was not just relevant in the 80s, but also today.”
“To realise I was embodying that element of a loveless marriage, it felt like it became a bit of a responsibility. I was really affected by — when I saw this particular scene in episode 3, which is really unpleasant. I knew it was going to be a lot, but I wasn’t expecting to be so affected by it,” he admits. “I went home and hugged my kids and I had to really process that. Putting it shortly — I’m getting ready to be hissed at the school gates.”
Asked whether Sarah and James, in their respective hungers and detachments, are perhaps two sides of the same toxic coin, both Atack and Chris find themselves wrestling with the contradiction at the heart of their characters. “I think Sarah’s more emotionally attuned. She’s like, more emotionally out of control, in a sense, like making bad decisions in a hurry,” muses Chris. Atack agrees. “It’s like a car crash. She just can’t stop. But there’s method to it — I think she wants to be loved. I think she has daddy issues, and I think she’s looking for a father figure to look after her and support her,” she reflects. “Women do at times — lots of women — we make bad decisions in our love lives, but it’s often because we are trying to be loved. I think it’s slightly different for men, sometimes, on the other side.”
“It’s nuanced and we’re all flawed and we all make mistakes. And finally, women like that are being written like this, being written well. They’re not just written as the devil in the red dress that’s trying to sleep with everyone’s husbands,” she says.
For Chris, however, James is a different beast entirely — one whose pathology is less about ambition or hunger than about a profound, almost terrifying inability to comprehend other people at all. “I don’t think they are two sides of the same coin, because I feel like James just has no room for anybody else in his life. If you asked Lizzie what it’s like to be in a loveless marriage, she would write you a beautiful prose poem or something. If you asked James what it was like to be in a loveless marriage, I think he’d look at you and just be extremely confused,” he reflects. “I just don’t think he would understand the parameters of the question. When he discovers how people may think of him and what things are going on — I don’t know if he’ll change, I don’t know if he has the capacity to do that, but I definitely think it’s going to break his brain.”
A richer, riskier, and altogether more emotionally devastating return for Rivals, Season 2 cements the show as one of the most singular and quietly subversive prestige dramas of its kind, a series unafraid to wield its brash 80s opulence as a means of examining the very real systems of class, gender, and power that continue to shape our lives today. With its first five episodes already among the most talked-about television of the year and the sixth episode debuting today, audiences won’t have long to wait before part 2 debuts this November.
The first 6 episodes of Rivals season 2 are now streaming on Hulu. The remaining 6 will debut this November.