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Maia Mitchell and Susie Porter spoke with Kyle Meredith about returning to Hulu’s The Artful Dodger for Season 2, where the show widens the lens beyond Jack and Fagan and lets Lady Bell and Lady Jane Fox steer into the mess. Between the two-year gap between seasons, the new lawman Inspector Boxer closing in, and Bell’s push to keep carving out a future in medicine, the series keeps its swagger while raising the stakes (and, occasionally, your gag reflex). Listen above or wherever you get your podcasts.
For Porter, Lady Jane is a woman navigating a rigged system and only gradually realizing how rigged it actually is. “Characters never see themselves as villains,” she says, insisting Jane believes she’s doing the right thing even when the fallout says otherwise. Season 2 pushes her out of her bubble of privilege and into the shock of seeing poverty up close. “To actually be shocked at some of the poverty that she had never seen… I think is a really, really big thing,” Porter explains, noting how the show threads in bigger ideas about class and gender without losing its sense of fun. And when it comes to sexism, the historical setting doesn’t soften the blow. “The role of females, of what they got to do back then was really not a great deal,” she says. “You have to hide what you’re doing because it wouldn’t have been allowed.”
Mitchell, meanwhile, frames Bell’s Season 2 arc like somebody who’s done leveling up the hard way. “She’s a different Belle,” Mitchell says, as the show picks up six months after the end of Season 1 — post surgery, post recovery, and mid-spiral trying to save Jack from being hanged. “She’s not as plucky. She’s not as naive. She’s lost some innocence… she’s kind of stronger than ever and way more dropped in and just like a little more adult.” And when the show heads into the operating room, Mitchell swears it’s not the usual “pretend to cut while the camera looks away” situation: “They build these full prosthetic torsos that you can cut open… the organs are in the right spot.” Which made the season’s belly-button sequence a special kind of punishment. “That was the worst thing that our showrunner’s ever done to me,” she says. “I made him come to set and put his finger in that belly button before I did it… That was my last scene of the whole season… Yeah. Horrible.”
Listen to Maia Mitchell and Susie Porter talk about The Artful Dodger Season 2, and more in the new episode above or by watching the video below. You can also revisit our interview with their co-stars David Thewlis and Thomas Brodie-Sangster on a recent episode here. Keep up on all the latest episodes by following Kyle Meredith With… on your favorite podcast platform; plus, check out all the series on the Consequence Podcast Network.
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