‘SurrealEstate’ Stars Tim Rozon & Sarah Levy on Luke’s Family Secret and Susan’s Power

SurrealEstate Series Premiere Susan Luke Sarah Levy Tim Rozon
Spoiler Alert
Blue Ice Pictures/SYFY

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the SurrealEstate series premiere.]

The Roman Agency gains a new real estate agent, Susan Ireland (Sarah Levy) in the SurrealEstate series premiere, and by the end of the episode, we learn that she and boss Luke Roman (Tim Rozon) both have secrets.

In the premiere, the team investigates strange happenings at medical student Megan’s (Tennille Read) house — among them terrifying visions of a mad doctor performing an autopsy on her and a hellhound — and Luke confides in her that he’s been watching her place for a while. Several years ago, it was unoccupied, and a neighbor stopped by to complain about the weeds. No one knows who answered the door, but that woman was never seen again. She was his mother, who left when he was little. “I’ll see you soon, Mom,” he says when he takes a last look up at one of the windows after they (supposedly?) get rid of all the evil spirits.

But don’t think you have any idea what’s really going on, Rozon warns while remaining very vague about just what’s going on there. “I think you’re going to think you know things at different times throughout the season, but you won’t know the real truth,” he tells TV Insider. “And then I don’t know if even that’s going to be the real truth and I think only [creator] George [R. Olson] knows, but I know that even within reading the scripts, there was a couple of times where I thought, ‘Oh, that’s why. Oh, no, that’s not why.'”

Meanwhile, Luke has Susan handle a problem house — items are flying off shelves — on her own. As she soon discovers, it’s the teenager moving things on her own. That’s when Susan confides in her that telekinesis like that develops in some kids at a certain age. “Something short-circuits. We flex muscle we didn’t even know we had, and then boom. Things move. Things get broken,” she explains and assures her she’ll learn to control it. “Trust me.” When the teen asks if things like this happened to her when she was her age, Susan confirms it did. She even had her own loser boyfriend problems and “I set things on fire.”

Tim Rozon SurrealEstate Premiere Luke Roman

Blue Ice Pictures/SYFY

Luke, who has his own ability (talking to the dead), knew about Susan’s powers before he hired her, thanks to a bit of research. Rozon isn’t quite sure how much that might have played a role in bringing her on compared to her experience in the business. “These guys have worked in the real estate business for a long time. They’ve known a lot about each other and each other’s work. I think he’s been watching some of and maybe even jealous of some of her accomplishments as a real estate agent. And at the end of the day, that’s what he needed for the Roman Agency. It had nothing to do with the rest of it, I believe,” he says.

However, he acknowledges, “OK, maybe. He has this special ability that nobody else that he’s met has. Now she doesn’t have the same ability, but birds of a feather.”

Levy agrees. “It’s a parallel ability that is hard to explain to other people and make other people believe that it exists in you without showing them. And then what are the repercussions of that? It’s alienating yourself from ‘normal people,'” she says. “So I think they’re both struggling with that on their own. And it’s maybe an underlying reason why they connect as well as they do without even kind of realizing it. They’re both hiding these somewhat — I think to the public — shameful things because they’re so different when in reality, it’s our differences that make us so special.”

SurrealEstate Premiere Roman Agency Phil Luke August Zooey Susan

Blue Ice Pictures/SYFY

Susan has had to keep this ability a secret in her previous job, but the nature of the houses that the Roman Agency investigates means that doesn’t have to remain the case. This season is about her “letting her vulnerability really come through and allow herself to express herself in all of the ways, including using the telekinesis that she has been kind of keeping a secret, even though the agency actually does know about it already,” she previews. “It’s seeing her blossom into much more of a fully formed functioning human being.”

SurrealEstate, Fridays, 10/9c, Syfy