‘Tulsa King’: Jay Will on the ‘Twists’ and ‘Higher Stakes’ Ahead

[Warning: The following post contains spoilers for Tulsa King Season 2 Episode 3, “Oklahoma vs. Manfredi.”]

Things are in full swing for Tulsa King Season 2, and the latest episode changed the game a lot. Because the threat of imprisonment that’s been looming over Dwight’s (Sylvester Stallone) head is gone, and he’s made his first move against the competition by taking out a would-be assassin sent by Bill Bevilaqua (Frank Grillo).

Dwight’s team, while also making legitimate loot through the weed shop and the casino, is also getting their hands a bit dirtier this season. Not only did they boost a bunch of car parts, but they took care of the, erm, disposal of Dwight’s victim, too. Perhaps surprisingly, Tyson (Jay Will) opted in for coroner duty, which means he’s potentially ready for some of the seedier parts of being a mafia associate.

TV Insider caught up with Will to find out where things are going with his character and what we can expect from the season going forward.

I want to start by talking about the relationship between Tyson and his dad. In the second episode, it’s pretty tense after Dwight spends the night. Are things going to get worse between them this season? 

Jay Will: I mean, somebody just popped my bubble earlier. I was like, I wanna know if I’ll be perceived as bad. It was like, “Well, that’s objective.” So I guess I’m gonna have to pop your bubble this time and say, it’ll be objective. I don’t know. I do think the stakes get higher. I will say that the stakes get much higher. Feelings get hurt, and things get tossed around. It’s the dynamic between the father and Tyson, the dynamic between the mother and Tyson, the dynamic between Tyson’s siblings and Tyson. I would keep an eye out for those if I knew better, for sure, because it’s different from what we’ve seen in the first season. But the fire, it becomes more and more and more until it pops. 

With Dwight and Tyson, is there a paternal relationship or is it pure friendship? 

I mean, I guess there’s a mentor-type of vibe going on. In a way, but I don’t think it’s like — Tyson has a father, Tyson has a father. It’s not like he’s coming from a broken home with a mother, a single mom situation. He’s coming from a beautiful, loving home where his parents taught him right from wrong, trained him up in ways that he should go, and now he’s departing from them in a way, you know? And so I think that there’s a dilemma that’s going on in Tyson when he goes back and forth from home to work. I mean, just to see how he chooses to make the decisions that he makes is the dilemma itself — how he decides to go about it all.

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Yeah, there are questions of morality with Tyson now. What do you think the reason is that he, at the end of the third episode, decides he wants to go with Bigfoot and dispose of this body, which seems a little bit out of character? What do you think is drawing him into that?

I think at that point he understands that there’s a specific initiation that has to be done to be trusted. I mean, I think that’s what initiation is — just the level of trusting, being trusted with specific secrets, being trusted with specific things that you would know that can’t be… Once you go past that threshold, you can always say, “We were there together at that time and you could trust me, then you could trust me now.” I think it was an initiation for him to go forward.

Brian Douglas/Paramount+

There’s a lightheartedness to his relationship with Dwight, so do you think he truly understands the consequences of being in this world?

Oh, man, I don’t know. I guess it is objective, too. I mean, he understands it, for sure. I think he does. I don’t think he cares as much that it’s [dangerous]. I think the respect and the through line and the moving objective for him is to make his family proud, to get his, just to prove to his father that he hasn’t been making the wrong decision. To be able to go home alive every day and to prove to them that [he’s successful], seeing him in the suits and the ties and seeing him in a better place pulling up with the Lincoln Navigator. I think that instills the trust in the family in his own because again, he does it for his father. 

I guess that’s the way I played it: I did it for my mother, I did it for my family to bring something over and to make a man out of myself of my own in this world for me. But I don’t think he completely knows the consequences. But how could you when you’ve never been in a situation like this before? How could you know? I mean, you ain’t gonna know until you do. He ends up in jail first season. The first time Tyson went to jail, he ends up — this is a good kid, this is a regular, good kid — deciding that, you know, I’m gonna tap into my shadow self. So it’s an interesting dynamic there for sure.

In the second episode, it was very musically oriented. Obviously, Garett Hedlund got to sing, but you also got to rap. How was that?

I wanted to see how that came about. Oh, it’s crazy. I didn’t even know they kept that in there. That’s good to know that they did. Wow, that’s really cool, man. Thank you for sharing that. I’ll never forget that day. Everybody knew I was a rapper. I was always working on my music, and in the trailer, I always have my speakers plugged in my laptop, working on beats, and writing stuff. And they would see me with my headphones, mixing my music on my cell phone. It was like, “Yo, what you working on over there?” I told them that I wanted to possibly see about getting the music on the show one day. I would like that. That would be cool for me. Either if it’s like a sync licensing type of thing or I’m literally rapping in the show. 

They later on told me… The writer was like, “Jay, no matter what, don’t stop rapping, don’t stop rapping. I’m gonna make it. So you don’t stop.” I just put it in the show, read the new episode. So I read it, and it says, Tyson raps this, and it was just the template of what he wrote. But he was like, “You can write whatever you wanna write in here.” I was like, wow, okay. So I laid on into the first bars, but then I added my own about six bars after that. I really wrote it in 15 minutes, maybe less than that, and I rapped to the director. He was like, “Ph, that’s perfect. It’s perfect. Next week, we’re gonna do it.” We did it the next week and I was nervous. It’s like, I’ve never done this before in front of these types of people here. But I just gave it my all and I did it. So it’s so fresh and to hear that they put that [in], that’s kind of a personal check mark. I’m glad, yo. So that’s really cool. It was a great moment.

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What else can you tease going ahead now that Tyson is kind of drifting towards that morally questionable part of this job? What else can we look forward to from him?

Yeah, you can look forward to more and more promotions within this world of the family, more and more promotions even in the future of the [show], even after the season, more and more promotions, more high-ranking opportunities, and more surprising turns, more twists and turns again. 

And you can also expect to learn more about the background of Tyson’s family and where he came from, where his dad comes from North Tulsa being out in the sticks, a whole different part of Tulsa, also giving a shout-out to Tulsa and the things that they’ve done with Black Wall Street back in the day, connecting those things. It’s a very exciting story to tell. 

 Tulsa King, Sundays, Paramount+