‘Surface’ EP & Gavin Drea on Sophie’s Investigation & Callum Trusting Her

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Surface Season 2 premiere “New Money.”]

Sophie (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) has settled in in London when the Surface Season 2 premiere begins. She’s embedding herself in elite British society (and going by Tess, the name on the passport she found), throwing around money to get the attention of the woman, Eliza (Millie Brady), she’s had flashes of since losing her memory, and she’s starting to find out just what she was up to in England the last time she was there.

The first major clue comes when a journalist, Callum Walsh (Gavin Drea), leaves a voicemail about continuing their conversation. An online search tells Sophie that he likes to expose the sins of the elite and hold them accountable. When she meets him — at her hotel bar, where he notes her full name of Tess Caldwell and begins digging into her background — she learns that they talked once before; she tells him she’ll only talk to him again if he sends her the recording of that.

Meanwhile, we get the first hints about Sophie’s history with Eliza; she disappeared on the latter and owes her an explanation (if not an apology). Sophie also looks up Eliza’s family, the Huntleys; the patriarch, William, is associated with multiple murder cases. Then, Callum sends her the recording of their previous conversation, in which she spoke about her mother being murdered when she was young by powerful people. Sophie then finds she had a private archive with clippings about William Huntley and her mother’s death inside, as well as an envelope that leads her to her flat in Mayfair. There, she finds a photo of her mother and a music box.

As the premiere ends, Sophie invites Callum to the philharmonic to talk. She tells him she’s using her relationship with Eliza to find out the truth: She thinks William Huntley killed her mom, and she needs him to help prove it. He warns her that will put her in danger, but she says she has nothing left to lose.

Related

The 25 Best Apple TV+ Shows, Ranked

“Sophie was in control of the story this season. She has set out to find Eliza on her own terms. She’s taking action in a way that we’ve never seen her do in Season 1, but what happens that she doesn’t expect is Callum, this journalist, calls her out of the blue and says, ‘Past you and I had a conversation,’ and she realizes he’s the key to this treasure trove of information, these clues that she had been putting together, this case in the past,” creator, writer, executive producer and showrunner Veronica West tells TV Insider. “Now she has all the evidence, but she doesn’t know what to make of it. So we get to see her put those puzzle pieces together in real-time throughout the course of the season.”

Callum is definitely suspicious that Sophie’s using him to get the information she told him previously. “You would be a bad investigative journalist if you trusted your source initially after them, first of all, blanking you for many months and then coming back out of the blue,” Drea points out. “He is 100 percent skeptical of her like he is of most things. By the end of the first episode, he’s definitely intrigued. He knows there’s something there. I think he’s got a good intuition for it. But at the same time, I think you’re meeting Callum in the first episode in a world where he knows that there’s leaks coming out of his own office. He’s had another story fall apart. He’s got an editor [Nina Sosanya] that’s putting him under pressure in terms of what he can and can’t write. And so I think he’s kind of backed into a corner a bit and he’s a bit exhausted by all of that, so he’s definitely on edge when Gugu’s character comes onto the scene.”

What did you think of the Season 2 premiere? What’s your take on the Huntleys so far? Let us know in the comments section.

Surface, Fridays, Apple TV+