Nine Perfect Strangers has gone all White Lotus. For the forthcoming second installment of David E. Kelley’s eerie mystery, the first season of which was set at a picturesque Californian wellness retreat, the show is moving to a stunning new location: the Swiss Alps. Nicole Kidman will, thankfully, return as the creepy Tranquillum House founder Masha Dmitrichenko, but she’ll be joined by nine new perfect strangers played by a host of familiar faces—including Crazy Rich Asians’s Henry Golding and one former White Lotus star.
Murray Bartlett–who won an Emmy for his portrayal of the erratic Armond in the first, Hawaii-set installment of Mike White’s critically lauded satire, and recently dazzled audiences in The Last of Us—has joined the ensemble, alongside Triangle of Sadness breakout Dolly de Leon, Cruella’s Mark Strong, Schitt’s Creek’s Annie Murphy, The Gilded Age’s Christine Baranski, and musician King Princess. They’ll star opposite Chocolat’s Lena Olin, Transatlantic’s Lucas Englander, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow’s Maisie Richardson-Sellers, and Turkish actor Aras Aydin. Kidman is poised to resume her duties as executive producer, too.
While the series’s first season was based on Big Little Lies author Liane Moriarty’s compulsive page-turner of the same name (and initially envisioned as a limited series), Season 2 won’t be grounded in any pre-existing source material. Per Deadline, it’ll follow “the general formula of the first installment [with] nine stressed city dwellers [trying] to get on a path to a better way of living with a 10-day stay at a boutique wellness resort run by Masha, a woman on a mission to reinvigorate their tired minds and bodies. However, these nine perfect strangers have no idea what is about to hit them.”
Considering that the first installment featured the likes of Melissa McCarthy, Regina Hall, Bobby Cannavale, Luke Evans, Michael Shannon, Samara Weaving, and Grace Van Patten, expect even more emerging and established names to be cast in the coming weeks and months. Until then, here’s to more stealthy micro-dosing, demented sack races, disturbing visions, and jaw-dropping confessions.