‘Surface’ Team Unpacks Sophie’s Meeting With Her Father & Vulnerability With James

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Surface Season 2 Episode 6 “Atonement.”]

Sophie finally comes face-to-face with her biological father, Henry Huntley, in the latest Surface episode, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Rupert Graves are both spectacular in their first meeting.

After Henry tries to pay her off through a third party, Sophie confronts him at a Huntley party. He says she looks so much like her mother and he wishes they could have met under different circumstances. When it comes to what she wants, she thought it was a father, a relationship, a family, but now she just wants answers about what happened to her mother (she’s investigating his family for her death). Henry claims that she came to see him, paranoid, and it was raining and her car went off the road. The car was on fire, and he even tried to get to her, he says, but couldn’t. He was scared and didn’t know what to do, so he did what his father said he should.

“Oh my god, Rupert Graves. Can we just have a moment for Rupert Graves? The man, the legend. Such an icon. I grew up watching him in films like E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View, with Helena Bonham Carter. I just am such a fan of him as an actor. And so when I knew that he was playing Henry, I was just so excited to get to work with him,” Mbatha-Raw tells TV Insider.

It does take until six episodes into the season for Sophie to confront him, she notes. “That scene is just such a turning point for Sophie and what she discovers, how he reveals or how he covers his tracks, I think her sort of rage and her quest for answers from him and the truth from him and knowing that he is spoiler alert actually her father, there is so much love and pain and hurt in that scene and getting to do that with an actor like Rupert was such a treat,” she raves. “It was a pages-long scene. Often in television, you have shorter scenes and a lot of action, and this was a lot of information, a lot of truth telling, a lot of dialogue between them. And I just loved working with him. I think he’s a phenomenal actor. So it was a treat on both levels, I think, as Sophie the character, and then as Gugu the actor, getting to work with an actor that I’ve grown up watching and admiring.”

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According to executive producer Veronica West, Sophie “wanted to go in there strong and confident and taking control of the situation that she felt has been out of her control for her whole life. But even when you enter situations like this — and that’s something we talked about in the writers’ room, and some of the writers have had experiences meeting family members that they didn’t have a relationship with — with all the anger, all the resentment, there’s still something that takes you off guard, that emotional connection. All of a sudden you’re looking at your dad. And as much as she tries to have her guard up, I think we get to the real emotions underneath that, too.”

She adds that from Henry’s point of view, his mission is what’s true of “all the Huntley men and women — Joely Richardson does an amazing job of this — guarding the family, family at all costs. We almost talked about it as a House of Cards type relationship between Henry and Olivia. They’re the heads of this family. They’re going to guard it at all costs.”

It’s after that conversation that Sophie and Quinn Huntley (Phil Dunster) talk for the first time since he learned she’s his sister. Mbatha-Raw points out that Sophie’s on a bit of a high entering that conversation since she recorded her talk with Henry.

“I kind of loved that scene because there’s such a tension between them, such a friction, and it’s the first time that they’ve met where they both have this new information and it’s sort of taut and combative, but in a public place where anybody could kind of overhear,” she says. “So there is an element of, I guess, just trying to keep a lid on their sort of mutual kind displeasure for each other’s style of working.”

Dunster adds, “Because it’s the first time that he’s spoken to her since finding this out, the tone at which it was written, he has a similar tone than he has with Eliza [Millie Brady], This sort of sort of brotherly, sisterly sort of clashing that he’s immediately falls into that pattern.”

According to Mbatha-Raw, Sophie “wants to stand up to Quinn [and] get away from him. Her take on him is that he’s not somebody to be trusted. I think she thinks he’s slippery and frankly dangerous. I think she knows he will stop at nothing to cover his tracks and his misdeeds of the past. She also really just feels kind of confused that they are related, but this is not going to be a beautiful kind of reunion. It is going to be tense and a lot of friction.”

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'Surface': Phil Dunster on Quinn's Reaction to Sophie Being His Sister

On Quinn’s part, he’s “very petulant” and “jealous” when it comes to Sophie, as well as “blinded by his own sense of need to hold onto the hierarchy that exists,” so he’s not happy with how she’s going about things, says Dunster. “He’s too selfish to be impressed.”

Sophie turns to her estranged husband James (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who surprised her by following her to London earlier this season, after Henry tried to pay her off. But they’re both still keeping secrets from one another — including that James couldn’t attend that party with her because he’s already met Quinn under false pretenses.

West says that James shows up this season as “an agent of chaos,” with “no intentions of forgiving Sophie,” which is why he does what he does with Quinn and sleeps with his fiancée Grac (Freida Pinto).

“He wants to make Sophie pay because he doesn’t know everything that we know. He doesn’t know the emotional reasons why Sophie’s there. He doesn’t know all of the drama that she’s uncovered,” the EP continues. Once Sophie fills him in, “that’s when I think he starts to feel, maybe I did know this woman, the woman I fell in love with, maybe that was the true Sophie. And that’s the question that the series continues to ask, who was the real Sophie?”

Adds exec producer Lauren Neustadter, “He clearly really cares about her. Their relationship is so interesting because you know that they really care about each other, and so sometimes it fuels the anger. But in moments like 206, I think it brings them together in a really lovely way.”

For Jackson-Cohen, it goes back to rebuilding trust and if that’s possible between these two characters. “It is never quite a done deal. It’s never quite a thing of like, oh, they’re now back together. It could disappear at any moment,” he explains. “It does feel like there are stakes there.”

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Mbatha-Raw sees these episodes as Sophie finally being “vulnerable” with James. “She feels a sense of betrayal from her father. She feels like she’s in a vulnerable state. I think she doesn’t really know where else to turn. And I think there is a sort of vulnerability and a comfort that is falling back into the James thing for her that feels like, in a city where she had nothing to lose, she played all her cards and now she’s like, “Oh God, I’ve got nothing and I don’t know where to turn and I can’t do this on my own anymore,” she says. “I think there is real love there at the bottom of it all, even though there’s been so much pain and betrayal.”

Speaking of betrayal, journalist Callum (Gavin Drea), who’s been digging into what happened to Sophie’s mother and Sophie, learns that his researcher has been selling information to Quinn.

“He feels like he’s at the end, doesn’t he? Callum’s ability to power through and to keep going and to find the energy and the drive to carry on is something that I really respect about his character,” Drea shares. “He’s knocked down a lot in this series, and he gets back up again. There’s some scenes later that help him maybe get to that place. But I think after the Claire incident, it’s less anger and more just complete despondency and hurt, and it feels like he has very little left then at that point. But somehow he keeps going.”

He does get a bit of a win when Sophie brings him the recording from her conversation with Henry. But she wants to remain anonymous in his reporting, which he knows is not likely possible. Drea calls that “a real crossroads for Callum’s character in terms of his own ambition and then the relationship that he has in spite of everything developed with Sophie.”

He continues, “It’s very difficult choice. And you can see him want to maybe just stick by the book and not care and get her name out there and just get the headline because that’s initially what he’s in the story for, just to get a headline. But obviously, he’s now too involved and you can see him slipping more into caring about her and wanting to protect her.”

Surface, Fridays, Apple TV+

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