William Jackson Harper and Sam Boyd talk Love Life season 2 and building the Nancy Meyers version of the MCU

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Nov. 11 episodes of Love Life.

Are you relieved Marcus' Love Life ended happily? We know we are.

For a minute there, it seemed like the book editor might not find his joy in the second season of the HBO Max anthology series. But after contending with failed relationships, cringe dorm-room sexcapades, mushroom-fulled meltdowns, and — oh, yes — a pandemic, romance ultimately prevailed, and Marcus (Emmy nominee William Jackson Harper) and Mia (Jessica Williams) quite literally jetted off into the sunset, secure in their relationship and contently loved up.

Fresh off the season 2 finale (and full of relief), we chatted to the former The Good Place star about taking over the lead role (his first on TV) from Anna Kendrick (who played the main character Darby on the show's first season) and creator Sam Boyd about why he chose Harper as his protagonist and his plans to expand his rom-com universe.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Sam, when you found out you were going to be making a second season, how did you approach it? Was it a case of finding your lead, then finding the story — or vice versa?

SAM BOYD: Going back to the very beginning of having the idea for the show, there was always this notion that we would reset every season and each of those seasons would be this character study of a new person. We'd move through this little universe that we would build up and up and up. I didn't think we would actually be so lucky to be able to do it, but then we found ourselves renewed for a second season and with this totally blank slate.

Did you know pretty quickly that you wanted Will as your lead?

BOYD: For me, it really just started with Will. Having that blank slate, we had such a unique opportunity to build this character study around an actor who's really exciting to us. Will was someone I'd been a huge fan of. We even talked about him as maybe one of the love interests in season 1. Anna [Kendrick] was a fan of his as well. The second I thought of him as the lead of season 2, it just clicked. It was so exciting to be able to then work backwards from his involvement with my co-showrunners Rachelle [Williams] and Bridget [Bedard] and the writers' room and build out this whole new character and journey.

Will, how was that experience for you? Sam coming to you with a project he wanted to build around you?

WILLIAM JACKSON HARPER: Sam approached me, and I didn't know him at all. I had seen the show come up on HBO Max, but I don't typically gravitate towards rom-coms, so it wasn't necessarily on my radar. But then my agent was like, "This is really good. You should check out this show." So I gave it a shot and really dug it. Yes, it's a rom-com, speaking in terms of genre, but it's different; it's so much more. It's about this woman growing up and making mistakes. Watching those relationships fall apart, it felt very real to me. It wasn't all cute. And then when Sam came to me with the idea of doing another season with me as a man who's sightly older who's built a bit more of a stable life for himself and having that all fall apart, that sounded really, really interesting. It was a great opportunity to dive into the character study of what it is to be a mid-30s dude trying to figure out who you are.

So Sam and I got together in the backyard and had a couple of cocktails. He's got a really keen eye for storytelling, and we vibe'd on the stuff that got us excited. Both of us like to play with expectations. I won't speak for Sam, but for me, it feels like he'll lure you in with his Trojan horse of "this is a genre thing" and then he'll be like, "Yeah, but we're going to actually dive in and get a little weird with it."

We also had great co-showrunners in Rachelle and Bridget, who could craft those stories and make them specific to this character. He actually started out somewhat different, and they wound up going back to the drawing board and writing certain things around what my vibe is. In particular, Rachelle had a lot of input about his being a Black man in the city and trying to date and what that is. We just wanted to find a way to tell a story that was truthful and stuck itself in this Trojan horse of "it's a rom-com."

Sam, how much of a challenge is it to strike the right tone for this show? Being a rom-com, it could so easily slip into cliché or become overly sentimental.

BOYD: It's always about starting from real things that happen to people, whether it's me and my co-showrunners on our own or in a vacuum, or working on something with the writers' room. So as far as the dialogue, it's always about trying to push it into the direction of verisimilitude as much as we can. The metric in the room on both seasons has always been, "If it feels too much like a TV show, keep on it." We talked about that a lot, the "TV show feeling" of something where you watch it and you can feel the artifice. We're always trying to push it as much as possible in the direction of real things.

Will, this was your first time leading a TV show. Were there any unexpected challenges?

HARPER: It was exhausting, but we just had such a phenomenal cast that I wanted to try to be at my best for them. They were coming in with choices and insights and just bringing their whole selves to the characters that I couldn't just mail it in. Even if I was tired, people were coming in with such interesting work and engaging me in so many interesting ways that I couldn't not just throw myself into everything. But, I mean, I definitely got home at the end of the day and felt like I got hit by a truck.

So a big difference from season 1 is that we meet Marcus' endgame love interest in the very first episode and then Mia (Jessica Williams) pops up in numerous episodes throughout the season before they get together. Why did you decide to shape the narrative that way this time around?

BOYD: We were trying to shake things up. To be totally honest, we wrote a whole other pilot that was basically the Marcus version of season 1. It kind of felt flat — too much like Darby and Augie. It was good, but it just wasn't new enough. So we ended up rebreaking the pilot. Beyond that, so much of it was about us trying to zig where season 1 zagged on a narrative level. Season 1 was very much about this woman in her 20s yearning for anyone to love her. So how can we tell a different story here? Maybe that story is not about one person trying to find someone, but it's about what it takes for two people to be ready for each other.

I was thinking about When Harry Met Sally and Love Jones and the Before Sunrise movies, and a lot of stories that have been told about two people circling each other over time only to come together, or not. That became really exciting to us, and then also the idea that it created this character we love in Mia, which gave us this opportunity for an incredible female performance from Jessica Williams. It felt fun, especially since we do put Marcus through the wringer with stuff like the dorm room scene. We have Marcus in this free fall, and I think it does help to have some sort of anchor. If he was just in free fall and it was like, "Who knows? Maybe he's going to meet the person in the finale!," that would be a little too despairing.

Will, how was working with Jessica? She's so magnetic as Mia.

HARPER: We met on Zoom because of the plague upon land. I've been a fan of Jessica for a while from The Daily Show and 2 Dope Queens. I just thought she was so cool — way cooler than I've ever been. When we were reading through the scenes together, something for me just clicked. I just had a certain awe of her, which I think Marcus has too. She's really open and funny and witty, and I was just like, "Wow, why is she even bothering to talk to me?" I feel like that was very much the energy written into the script: "I can't believe this woman is even giving me the time of day." It takes off from there, but I think it's a testament to how talented Jessica is. She has this ease and mystery about her. I read somewhere that someone had written, "Jessica Williams, she's my type" and someone replied, "Yeah, she's everybody's type." I think that's right. She has this magical quality about her.

There's some pretty cringe moments for Marcus over the course of the season, in particular the college dorm scene. How did you approach those, Will? Did you work with an intimacy coordinator for the sex scenes?

HARPER: Oh, dear. Yeah, we definitely had an intimacy coordinator. Those things are always nerve-wracking for everybody. You don't just go for it. You get very clear consent with every single move. You're still acting, but it's very much a dance, very choreographed. And thankfully our intimacy coordinator, Olivia Troy, was very clear about how everything happened, how it had to look, and we locked in with each other and then would joke in between — because it's awkward having play sex! I mean, that's just a weird thing to do at work.

Sam, you also chose to include the pandemic in this season. Can you talk about the decision to do that and what it offered in terms of storytelling?

BOYD: I felt like we backed ourselves into a corner a bit because season 1 is so specific about time. We're moving back and forth so that when season 2 starts and it's 2016, where is that in Darby's journey and where is that in Marcus' journey? So we had a couple of options: We could have stopped short of it, or we could have ignored it. But being a universe where [Hurricane] Sandy exists but the pandemic doesn't would be weird. More and more it just became an opportunity to take this character who is so wrapped up in how the world perceives him and the pandemic allowed us to go, "Everyone else is gone — it's just you. What do you have to reckon with?" How does that help him as he's in the home stretch of his story? And the more we thought about it, the more it felt like a really natural way to put the character in that position and push him in his development.

Well, including real events also gave you the opportunity to address the Black Lives Matter movement. Sam, was that a case of stepping back and letting writers with that experience take the wheel? And what were the conversations like in the writers' room to make sure it was as authentic as possible?

BOYD: To tell a story about 2020 and avoid that would feel so wrong. We were very conscious of wanting to acknowledge it — especially as an underpinning for Marcus quitting and this whole speech that he gives to his boss on Zoom — but not wanting to hit [viewers] over the head. We tried to approach it the same way we try to approach everything in both seasons of the show, which is to talk about stuff without talking about it. So much of that was this incredible writers' room that we put together, and Rachelle as co-showrunner and EP and myself just getting out of the way. For me, it was about working with collaborators who do have the experience and looking to them for how they wanted to tell that story and what was important about that.

Will, how much of Marcus' pain and frustration did you relate to?

HARPER: Well, the quitting thing was really cathartic. Marcus was getting to say a lot of stuff I was thinking. I mean, I don't work in publishing, so maybe not those those exact things, but with everything that was happening last year, it felt like a lot of white people were all of a sudden like, "I didn't know it was this bad and I'm so sorry," and in my head I'm just going, "It's always been like this! This is not new. It has always been this. And now everybody's sorry? Now everybody gives a damn? Shut up! You don't get credit for coming to this particular f---ing funeral late. No, you don't get that."

So, yeah, it felt right. I don't know if anyone has quit their job in that way, but I think that for Marcus, though, this is something that's been boiling for a long time and he's been pushing down a lot because he's trying to promote Black talent that he really believes in and they aren't taken seriously because they're Black. They're not afforded the same respect right off the bat as writers because they're Black. Part of our responsibility is to put this out in the world so people can experience it and identify with it and be swept away by it. And you just don't want to because of this environment in which there are these unspoken, unwritten rules all over the place that say, "In order for a public to identify with any piece of art, it has to be defaulted to some sort of white protagonist." I think Marcus hates that. I mean, I hate that. So in that moment, I got to say some stuff I've wanted to say.

Looking forward to a possible third season, Sam, do you have ideas of where you'd like to take it and with whom?

BOYD: I think, like with season 2, it definitely will start with the actor. We're very excited at the opportunity for this show to feel as big and sweeping and reflective of the actual world as possible. We've had a lot of discussions, although nothing's set in stone. We're just starting to think about wanting to follow an LGBTQ+ character and, again, with every season trying to broaden the scope. We're trying to make the show less about any one thing and more about this multitude of characters and experiences that hopefully, cumulatively, all feel like the real world.

And will you bring Will as Marcus back as the bridge like you did with Anna Kendrick?

BOYD: There was always an intention to make the whole thing feel like this shared universe. If we're lucky enough to continue the show, it would always have this baton-pass feeling. What was exciting to me, from the very beginning, was we can hone in on all these different characters across however many seasons, but it's all happening at the same time. It's like the Nancy Meyers version of the MCU. So having this baton-pass from Darby to Marcus and having her pop up and thread through is a way to make it feel like the same show, while it also feels like a totally different show. It's about the small ways we can connect it back to season 1 and make it feel cohesive — and also Anna is great, so anytime you can have her pop in, it's fun to figure it out.

Will, would you come back for a few appearances as Marcus next season to pass the baton?

HARPER: Oh, yeah, of course. It's a great set. Everyone's really great. I love it and I would be back in a heartbeat.

Love Life season 2 is streaming now on HBO Max.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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