‘Butterfly’ Stars on That Finale Cliffhanger & Season 2 Hopes

[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for all six episodes of Butterfly.]

After executing his plan to take down the vicious spy organization Caddis, David Jung (Daniel Dae Kim) still has his work cut out for him after the events of the finale of Butterfly.

The series follows David as he returns from a faked death — and new life — to rescue his estranged daughter Rebecca (Reina Hardesty) from his former partner Juno (Piper Perabo). Together, the two go on the run to escape a determined assassin, all while working to expose Juno for her deceptive deals and patching up the bonds that have been broken between them by his sudden disappearance.

Rebecca’s feelings about David are complicated by his new marriage to Eunju (Kim Tae-hee) and second daughter Minhee, as well as her own relationship with Juno, who took her under her wing after David’s departure. Also roped into the mess is Juno’s son, Oliver (Louis Landau), who’s desperate to live up to her expectations but gets swayed by evidence that she might harm him for his incompetence.

In the end, Oliver is convinced to turn on Juno and Caddis, leaving her to flee on a private jet, but he feels remorse after speaking with her. Meanwhile, David and Rebecca seem content to forge a new path together with Eunju and Minhee … until Eunju turns up stabbed in a restaurant bathroom, and Rebecca is nowhere to be found.

To break down the events of the show and find out what might be next if the spy thriller is renewed for Season 2, TV Insider caught up with the stars of Butterfly. Read on to find their responses to our biggest questions.

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Eunju’s fate is unknown, even to the actress playing her.

Kim Tae-hee doesn’t yet know if her character can survive the wound we last see her with, but if she does return for Season 2, the actress said, “I hope I could have some more action scenes.”

As for why Eunju is so supportive of David’s decision to resurface from their happy home life to find Rebecca, she said, “Eunju definitely knows the dangers of the situation, but I think she also knows that there is no stopping him… Eunju is a courageous woman, and because of that, I think she’s giving him the space to do what he needs to do.”

David doesn’t fully trust Rebecca, even in the end.

According to Daniel Dae Kim, even though David deeply loves Rebecca, he still sleeps with one eye open around her. “I don’t think David trusts Rebecca now,” he admitted. “I think that’s the journey of the first season between the two of them. It’s whether they can trust each other after everything that’s happened in the past, and I think David is trying to win Rebecca’s trust, but I don’t think he’s 100% trusting her as well.”

Still, he does agree with Juno’s assessment that the character is naive and tends to see the best in people. “David is idealistic,” the actor and executive producer agreed. “People who are not idealistic always call people who are idealistic ‘naive,’ and the flip side is that idealists call pessimists or realists ‘cynics.'”

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Juno is at least partially sincere about her feelings for Rebecca and Oliver — and the feeling’s mutual.

As ruthless as her character is, Piper Perabo still believes Juno does have a soft spot for her son and Rebecca and that her declarations of the same are authentic.

“I think sometimes she’s being sincere unintentionally. I think when you’re with your family, you have moments of being unguarded,” the actress said. “A lot of the time, she’s manipulating them, but there are moments where she even takes herself by surprise, because she does love them.”

Similarly, Reina Hardesty believes that Rebecca genuinely loves Juno, despite choosing David and helping to set Juno up. “I think Rebecca has very complicated relationships with both David and Juno, and with Juno in particular, it’s like she spent nine years wanting so badly to be accepted and be the star child and to feel worthy of Juno’s acceptance,” she said. “Even though she’s not my mom, there’s this need for her validation.”

Juno is going to be looking for somewhere to hide… for now.

In the finale, after Oliver has turned on her, Juno is last seen running away on a jet. To where? Perabo guessed, “The immediate concerns of Juno on that plane at the end are, ‘Can I get my son out of American custody, and where can I go that I’m unreachable by the American government?’ Those are really complicated questions, obviously, and hard to accomplish on the fly.”

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The aftermath of that attack is already in view.

If the show returns for a second season, Kim already has a plan for what comes next for the characters after Eunju’s attack and Rebecca’s disappearance. “What can I tease about it? Well, I’ll say that the ramifications of that event lead to some serious soul searching and in some cases, changes of personality,” he teased.

Season 2 could expand the worldview beyond Korea.

If Butterfly Season 2 comes to pass, Kim could look outside of Korea, where all six episodes of the first season took place. “I have lots of hopes for it. I hope there is a second season, first of all. But what I like about the show is that we’re already establishing that it’s an international show. So it makes the world our oyster. We could go anywhere. And given the nature of what David and Rebecca do, you could see them traveling. You could see them settling somewhere else. That’s kind of the goal at the start of Season 1. So we’ll see,” he explained.

Meanwhile, Hardesty hopes her character might find a new path all her own, explaining, “I think for Rebecca in Season 1, you’re seeing her being pulled between two worlds and deciding whether or not to kind of please her father or be good or please Juno. And it would be really nice to see Rebecca decide what she actually wants, instead of coming from this place and needing to be loved and really sit with herself and meet herself and process these feelings. I’m really interested to see who she would be without her reactive tendencies. So essentially, therapy for Rebecca would be interesting.”

For Perabo’s part, she just wants to see more of the Juno-David dynamic that is teased throughout the first stretch. “In Season 2, I’d like to see their dynamic together because that’s what kind of got this all started,” she said. “They seem like such an unlikely duo. I’d like to see that in action.”

Find out more of the cast’s thoughts on Butterfly in the full video above.

Butterfly, Amazon Prime Video