‘Paradise’ Creator, Star Answer Finale Cliffhangers and What to Expect in Season 2

[This story contains major spoilers from the season finale of Paradise, “The Man Who Kept the Secrets.”]

Paradise has been one twisty show, with each episode revealing more about the post-apocalyptic underground bunker that creator Dan Fogelman has centered in his Hulu series. The entirety of the season’s eight episodes have been building toward the whodunnit reveal of who killed the show’s president, Cal Bradford, who is played in flashback by James Marsden throughout the season.

Finally, with the finale that released on Tuesday — and as Fogelman and star/executive producer Sterling K. Brown had promised — Paradise revealed who killed Cal. When speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about the ending and how it sets up the already renewed second season, Fogelman and star Julianne Nicholson hadn’t yet talked about the big reveal to anyone outside the Paradise fold.

Below, in their chat with THR, the creator and his star unpack the elaborate reveal around the whodunnit, but speak more broadly about what’s coming in season two and, hopefully, season three. “We have this very precise three-year plan, and this next season coming is kind of the middle episode of our trilogy with also its own beginning, middle and end,” Fogelman reveals to THR. “We have a three-season story that’s bigger than what people think it is right now, and it’s going to span a couple of genres.”

As it turns out (spoiler alert!), the killer was hiding in plain sight all season as the bunker’s librarian (played by Ian Merrigan), a disgruntled former employee of city founder Sinatra (played by Nicholson), who helped build the city and was turned away. His resentment led to the attempted assassination on Cal that viewers saw earlier in the season — when Brown’s Secret Service agent, Xavier Collins, took a bullet for the president — and eventually led to the librarian’s own death by suicide, exposing that all is not perfect in Paradise City.

The finale ended with Xavier heading out into the unknown world in search of his wife (Enuka Okuma), who was revealed to be alive after Xavier thought she had perished. Nicholson’s Sinatra, meanwhile, was left incapacitated in a hospital bed after being shot by Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom), the double agent who also murdered Billy (Jon Beavers).

Who will rise up to lead Paradise in Sinatra’s place? What is Sinatra’s fate? Will season two journey out into the near-extinct world above with Xavier? All of these questions and more are answered, below.

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First, what can you tell us about Sinatra’s fate? We last see her breathing but unconscious, and hooked up to a ventilator in a hospital bed.

DAN FOGELMAN She’s incapacitated. But Julianne is going to be in the show next year, and she’s not going to be in a bed the entire season. However Sinatra, like any delicious leader, even when she’s a step behind the curve and losing control, she always seemed to find a way out of it and regain control. What you’re seeing at the end of the season is Sinatra at her lowest point. She’s lost control. She’s physically incapacitated. This crazy young woman [Jane] is hovering over her and so the question of season two is: How does she come back to center? How does she try to regain power? Is she able to? Do the turn of events cause a change in her? Those are all the large questions on the table.

So Sinatra will play a large role in season two? That’s what I just heard you say.

FOGELMAN Oh, absolutely. Yes, yes, absolutely. Before you came on for this interview, I was just pitching Julianne some giant stuff from season two, all out of order and complicated (laughs). But yes, it’s fair to say that Sinatra remains the driver of this bunker city and as we get into season two down below [in the bunker], there’s a bigger story and mystery that involves this city that Julianne’s character has been at the forefront of the entire time. So there’s a lot more to be revealed.

Julianne, I don’t know if you read this THR interview with Dan, but he revealed to us that he told a white lie to Disney in order to get you on this show. Did you know about that?

NICHOLSON No, I didn’t! Disney has been so incredible with their support of the show, and we had a premiere in London and in Paris. You get to know everybody when you’re working, but in those two and a half days we all spent together, I got to know each one of them so much more. When we were in Paris, one of the journalists there revealed that to me.

FOGELMAN I don’t think I ever told her that part. I also got calls from Disney about it. In a funny way!

NICHOLSON It makes for a good story now, I think. And I couldn’t be more grateful. It’s probably better that I didn’t know, actually, because I might have felt a little bit more little pressure. (Laughs)

When I spoke to Sterling about last week’s penultimate episode, he called you a real-life monster as an actor, Julianne. Sinatra is a complex, layered, quote-unquote villain. In this finale before she gets shot by Jane, she shows remorse like we haven’t seen in a while, thinking that Xavier’s daughter was dead. (She’s alive.) How have you been playing her moral ambiguity, and did that scene help inform your Sinatra?

NICHOLSON When Dan and I first spoke, he was talking about not wanting Sinatra to be your traditional villain. He wanted her to be a more relatable person with an inner life and vulnerability. So I just take it scene by scene. That second episode [of her backstory] was such a gift to me — nine times out of 10, you’re creating your own backstory of a character — so to have this beautiful script where you are allowed to live an arc of two decades in a person’s life; you see her at 30 and then five years later and five years later. So it was about playing each scene for the truth of it with Dan’s words, and then imagining what that might feel like, knowing where she’s come from and the situation they then find themselves in with extinction outside of the bunker imagined — even though she knows it’s not entirely that. But it’s high, high stakes and about trying to live in the moment to moment of that.

Dan has had a three-season plan for Paradise. Do you know the full scope for season two and what Sinatra looks like when she comes out of this?

NICHOLSON Not really, no. I have some ideas of where she gets to, but I’m not sure where we find her when we next see her.

So then Dan, what does Sinatra look like when she rises from these ashes? She has been calling the shots for so long that to be taken down and sidelined, I imagine would be tortuous, not to mention the health issues that could come from this.

FOGELMAN That is the question for her. You could imagine a version of her that is on a quest to regain her position amid who filled the power vacuum while she’s been out, and her being desperate to reclaim it. But you also have to wonder if the psychological toll of the seasons’ events have changed her and what that’s going to do.

You rightfully point out one of my favorite moments. What Julian did in that final moment when she’s about to get shot, when her defense mechanisms are down and she’s saying, “God forgive me,” that’s the most real version of present-day Sinatra you’ve seen. Because all the versions of her that say “I’m not a monster. I’m doing this for the greater good” have kind of stripped down when she thinks a child has been killed. It’s a line that’s been crossed that she’ll never come back from. [Note: Sinatra’s son died as a young boy.] So it’s an interesting balancing act of where she comes out on the other side. She has a mission here, and it’s an even bigger mission than the audience knows right now. So, how quickly can she find her footing to regain control of that mission, or has something been broken that makes it impossible for her to do so?

How important was it that we could have never guessed who actually killed the president? The murderer (played by Ian Merrigan) exposed Sinatra’s invincibility. We see that Sinatra’s not invincible and now everyone is going to question her and everything about the bunker.

FOGELMAN From the beginning, we knew that “who murdered Cal?” was going to be a question people were asking and wanting an answer to, and we wanted the murderer to be somebody that hid in plain sight in the show, but whose story and backstory, which is such a part of this season, is about the formation of the bunker itself and the upstairs-downstairs dynamic of a small group of people being chosen while everybody else was cast aside. And a small group of people who actually constructed the bunker while everybody else was cast inside. This was our plan from the beginning.

There are a lot of little Easter eggs throughout the season. If you look back even as early as episodes two and four, you can see things in the library. The casing of how we built this bunker is all in a display diorama in the library that the librarian is always focused on and asking people if they want to see it or be a part of it. In episode four when Sterling is entering the bunker with his children [in the flashback to the end of the world] and his wife is being deleted [from the access system], in the background in that scene, you can see the librarian having the conniption that will distract everybody that allows him to get into the bunker. We wanted it to hide it in plain sight and have it be a delicious, fun surprise for everybody, but also have it be something that makes sense that, holy shit, it was our very origin story to the assassination of Cal Bradford. This was the same guy.

The reason he was trying to assassinate Cal was because he knew what the bunker was before anybody else did, and he helped design and build it. So it was all part of the master plan that the writers and I had of saying something about the Bunker City and about the fragility of the whole thing. Instead of some reveal about it being a major character who’s been there the whole time and making up a reason they killed the president at the last minute, it was more formative.

NICHOLSON When I watched it with my husband, I kept expecting that any time we saw Ian in the show, my husband would be like, “Oh, it’s got to be him.” But that never happened.

FOGELMAN I forget when I told you guys who the murderer was. I don’t remember if I told you very early or late?

NICHOLSON Definitely not early. I would say probably a couple of months in? Probably after we had done the first four episodes.

FOGELMAN One of the coolest parts about this happened when we had a screening out here in Los Angeles. People [on the cast and crew] brought their families and Ian, the actor who plays the librarian, brought his lifetime manager or agent. We screened the first episode and he said to her, “What did you think of my part?” And she goes, “You weren’t in the first episode. Did I miss it?” This was somebody who’s known him for 30 years. She didn’t catch that the guy who was very front and center during that assassination attempt was Ian. Our hair and makeup people did an incredible job. We put Ian through such paces when we cast him in the part. He had to undergo all these hair and makeup tests to make sure that we could hide him in plain sight in that scene, so that he could also be the librarian throughout the series and nobody would ever put the two people together until the finale.

Julianne, I’m curious to hear your response to the librarian’s accusation. He sums up the bunker as not being about the American dream, but being a new kind of prison. Do you think Sinatra still hopes for it to be the American dream, even though she harbors all these secrets?

NICHOSON I think how this ends will have shaken her to her core. I don’t think she’s going to be the same person when we meet her again. I’ve just heard [from Dan] that there’s a lot more that she knows. So I don’t think it’s about the American dream. It almost feels bigger than that to me. It feels more like humanity. I can’t wait to see how that all shakes out, but I think she’s still a fighter. This is all just gut feelings, but I think she’s maybe going to not be as pulled together, maybe not as contained. It’s going to be interesting to see what that looks like, now having been through what we’ve all been through in the last couple of episodes. But I think she’s a good person and I think she still wants to do the right thing, and I think she cares about people. We’ll see how that all pans out!

FOGELMAN We have this very precise three-year plan, and this next season coming is kind of the middle episode of our trilogy with also its own beginning, middle and end. Wherever you think of Sinatra on the spectrum — is she pure good and fighting for the greater good? Is she pure bad guy who’s done these terrible things and is irredeemable? — you’re going to have a much wider view of her by the end of the second season, no matter where you fall.

Will you pick up right where season one left off or time jump? Will you follow Xavier’s journey out into the world to find his wife? And, how are you going to split time between the outside world and the bunker in season two?

FOGELMAN All good questions. We are going to pretty much be picking up in real time. We’re going to live in both worlds. There is going to be a little bit of a start where we go on a journey with Xavier. A very exciting, emotional, big journey, and then we will also be living in our downstairs world of the bunker, and forces will eventually be colliding. That’s basically the plan.

Is this the end for President Bradford now that his murder is solved, or will we continue to see James Marsden in flashbacks?

FOGELMAN James has been pitching me “zombie Cal Bradford,” which we’re not going to do. (Laughs) We killed two characters this season where we loved the characters, and obviously loved the actors, and James is amazing and a big part of it all. I’ve done this before on other shows; what we won’t do and what you can’t do is change your story just to accommodate because you like somebody. Because if the story’s not going in that direction, it just gets worse. But will there be opportunities in real ways to do meaty stuff? I think there is going to be, yes, because it’s going to fit inside of our story.

We have a really giant three-season story coming that’s bigger than what people think it is right now, and it’s going to span a couple of genres. The show was set up and sold as a political thriller about solving the murder of an assassinated president, and by the end of the first episode, you saw that it was something else and it went into a different genre. The second season is going to do the same thing to the first season. It expands upon itself. We have a plan and, hopefully, by the end of all three seasons, people will feel like they’ve been served a complete meal and that it’s all one piece, even though they went through a lot of different journeys to get to the end.

So Julianne, you know some of that. What has this process of Paradise been like for you, where you are learning as you go along?

NICHOLSON It has been a really exciting process. I read the first four episodes and Dan assured me that my character was not going to be killed in episode six or eight, so I knew that I would have fun stuff to do. It’s been really fun and interesting to learn as I go who this person is. I’ve never played anyone like this. I’ve never gotten the reactions that I have. It’s so fun to be hated! It’s been a really rewarding and exciting to see, and I I cannot wait to see what the writers are serving up for us next. I’m really excited to get back into it.

Seems like the Disney risk was worth it!

(Both laugh.)

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Paradise is now streaming all of season one on Hulu. Head here for THR’s season coverage and interviews.