‘Surface’: Gugu Mbatha-Raw Calls Shocking Sophie Reveal a ‘Rug Pull’

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Surface Season 2 Episode 4 “Legacy.”]

Sophie (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is still putting the pieces of her life back together as she investigates her mother’s death in Surface Season 2, and Episode 4 ends with a bombshell about her identity.

Sophie joins Eliza (Millie Brady) at the Huntley estate for an overnight trip, and it’s there they start talking about their past. Eliza remembers how the other ran off from a party like she’d seen a ghost. They never should have been riding the next day, and Eliza got hurt and Sophie left her. She was one of the first girls Eliza ever liked. Sophie wishes she could go back and change it. But later, after Sophie and Eliza have a night of drinking and dancing, the former makes a shocking discovery: Eliza remarks that her father gave a music box to each of his children … and Sophie has the same one! Sophie’s a Huntley!

While that’s a shock to the audience and to Sophie (she’s the only one who knows so far), it wasn’t to the cast. Mbatha-Raw and Brady tell TV Insider that showrunner Veronica West let them in on that secret from the beginning.

“I love that. We did know for a while, but then you have these secrets, and then you have to sort of bury the secrets. And I think that’s wonderful that Veronica let us in on that as a showrunner and our trust because it’s going somewhere deep and dark and intriguing,” says Mbatha-Raw. “So as an actor to have the trust, to have the knowledge of that is a great respect, I think. But then also, you bury it and you have to then get back into the point of view of your character and what that means to discover that in that moment.”

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Brady shares that West clued her in on her first day in Season 1 during a fitting. “Veronica came into my trainer and she gave me this amazingly detailed rundown of the past, the present, the future, where it’s going, and so it was this amazing meeting of seeing how in-depth this world has been created in Veronica’s mind,” she says. “And so it was quite fun knowing the information really early on and knowing that this was a secret that we were going to sit on for quite a while until it came out. It’s quite fun to play with that. You know something.”

Adds West, “We knew that Eliza and Sophie were sisters from the very beginning. From the moment we had that girl Eliza in the flashbacks in Season 1, we knew that this is where we were headed. We were just excited to see where Millie took this character.”

While it could have easily been a season-ending reveal, having it now, in the middle of the season, gives them so much more to play with. “What we realized as we were moving forward was, there’s so much story to tell after you have that bomb drop. How awkward is it for her to be in the room with Sophie now that she knows that they’re sisters? How does Sophie deal with the new relationship to these people? And there was so much story to tell after the twist that we could have put it at the end of the season and just said, oh, well, that’s the story,” West explains. “So we made the choice to drop probably the biggest twist of the season in the middle of the season. And then we had to top it for the end of 208, which I think we did.”

Looking at it from Sophie’s point of view, “Things are going pretty well as she’s kind of embedding herself into this family and this society, and that becomes such a rug pull halfway through the season that she has to reassess all of her relationships,” Mbatha-Raw says. “It kind of really raises the stakes and another sort of more propulsive end to the second half of the season really. So, yeah, I love it. It’s one of the many big juicy secrets of the show.”

This does add a new, complicated layer to Sophie and Eliza’s relationship. “Eliza had these feelings for this older woman who came into her life and had no idea who they were to each other. And in the past, Sophie had no idea who they were to each other either because she was at the Huntley Estate to figure out what her connection was to try to verify this theory,” explains West. “So as soon as she realized who Henry [Rupert Graves] was to her and that she and Eliza were to each other, she ran. And that explains kind of this traumatic flashback that’s been so deeply engraved in Sophie’s memory that it’s one of the first memories she had even after she woke up from the accident. So we finally get to see why that was so devastating for both of them and then start a whole new relationship and a friendship and maybe even a sisterhood between the two of them in the present day.”

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Elsewhere in the episode, Sophie’s husband James (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), having surprised her by showing up in London, makes some moves of his own, orchestrating a casual bump-in with Quinn (Phil Dunster), Eliza’s brother, and ultimately being brought along for drinks with Quinn’s fiancée, Grace (Freida Pinto), at an exclusive bar. Grace interrupts Quinn hitting on another woman — rules have changed since they’ve gotten engaged, Pinto explains — and he then gets into a fight. James helps Grace bring Quinn home. After Quinn’s in bed, and Grace sees that a video of her fiancé and a call girl, Phoebe, has surfaced online, she kisses James.

Having Grace and James sleep together is “all about complicating these relationships,” executive producer Lauren Neustadter tells us. “One of the things that’s incredible about this show is no one is entirely good, no one is entirely bad. They’re all incredibly complicated. And I think having Grace and James together inside of that episode sort of puts everything on its head for Quinn, for Sophie, and for our audience. And then it’s really sort of, where are we going to go from here? I think it’s really an unexpected and interesting plot twist in a season full of awesome plot twists. Grace and James are both pretty frustrated and unhappy at the moment when they come together, so you do kind of get it.”

Pinto agrees that it’s “complicated.” Grace and Quinn’s relationship did have rules in place that allowed for outside connections, but that changed with the engagement — they just didn’t talk about it. “And so when she comes to a place in her life where she is actually feeling like she cannot get, for the life of her, this man that she’s going to marry to speak to her, to listen to what she has to say, how the questions that she has are not getting the answers that they deserve, in that moment of desperation, she turns to James, who she suddenly sees as this man who could just take in all her pain in that moment,” says Pinto.

Meanwhile, Quinn may have wanted Phoebe gone, but he didn’t want her dead. So how does he feel if someone did go to those lengths for him?

“As we’ve learned by that point, there’s rumors about those sort of acts being carried out in the name of the Huntleys, and I think that’s something that he’s really trying to step away from, that sort of nefarious history that the Huntleys have,” Dunster tells us. “He wants to bring them into the 21st Century but also wants to not have to be shrouded in mystery and lies so much. I think that he really is trying to step away from this underworld the Huntleys have sort of lived in for a little bit.”

What did you think of the Sophie Huntley reveal? Let us know in the comments section below.

Surface, Fridays, Apple TV+