Will there be a Normal People Season 2?
Unfortunately, probably not—at least not right now. The show’s Hulu publicist told Parade.com that the show was always intended to be a limited series, so they don’t see that changing. But if you want to hold out hope, it seems that the show’s creative team and stars might be on board if another season was possible. “It’s no more likely or less likely,” star Paul Mescal told Digital Spy in December. “It’s still a character that I love and would be interested in—but it’s not my decision…I’d love to be able to go back to it.” There had been discussions, he said, but “only kind of barstool talk about who those characters are, and where we think they would be in years to come…nothing other than kind of hypothesizing about those wonderful characters.” Executive producer Ed Guiney also didn’t close the door on a second season. “Maybe in the future at some point in time,” Guiney told The Hollywood Reporter last April, noting that the team is not thinking about it at the moment. “It feels like we tell a very complete story about these characters’ lives, and so it’s not something we’re moving to do…maybe there’s a version of it down the line.” We can only hope!
What would happen in Normal People Season 2?
Show director and executive producer Lenny Abrahamson wouldn’t mind revisiting the characters. “We’ve talked about the possibility of how interesting it would be to check back in with [the characters],” Abrahamson told Deadline in July. “But apart from just general musings and over a drink, no, there have been no concrete discussions about what it would be like. As Sally says, the book stops where it stops because it feels right. But, I have a sneaking thing in the back of my head that if everybody was willing, and if the stars aligned, I’d love to revisit them in five years and find out what happened, where they are.” If that was the case, a second season would see Marianne and Connell some years later, after Connell’s New York trip. “Is somebody a father or a mother? What relationships are they in that then get disrupted by their meeting again?” Abrahamson said. “But it would be really strange to pick that up eight weeks later with him traveling to New York, I think. There needs to be time.”
Who’s in the Normal People cast?
Irish theater actor Paul Mescal stars as Connell in his first on-screen role, and Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Marianne. Like his character, Mescal attended Trinity College. For their roles, Mescal was nominated for an Emmy Award, and Edgar-Jones a Golden Globe. The actors have amazing chemistry on-screen, and Edgar-Jones says they bonded off-camera as well, but in a slightly different way. “[Marianne and Connell’s] dynamic is quite different from mine and Paul’s,” Edgar-Jones told Deadline, “because they are wonderful, but they are quite serious at times. And I think Paul and I are quite silly and we get hysterical quite quickly and easily. So, if we were ever doing things that were quite emotional, we were able to have a good giggle off screen.”
Do Marianne and Connell end up together?
Viewers aren’t alone in wanting the couple’s happy ending. “I hope that they do end up getting married and have loads of kids,” Edgar-Jones told Deadline. Mescal also told the outlet that he thinks Connell would end up marrying someone else first. “It’ll be a long process of discovery until they finally find each other permanently, I think,” he said. “I really need them to be together. If Sally ever decides to do the second book or second series, I need them to be together.” Turns out, Rooney did write a sort-of sequel in the form of a short story about Marianne and Connell—but, it was published in 2016 before the novel came out, as she explored the characters in a kind of writing exercise. “I kept wanting to write about these characters who were in their early twenties,” Rooney told the New Statesman, “and their relationship had this texture to it because of their history. Eventually, I thought, what if I just went back and just told their story from the beginning, chronologically.” In Rooney’s short story, titled “At the Clinic,” they are 23 and Marianne needs a ride to the dentist’s office to have a tooth extracted. Connell was seeing someone, but slept with Marianne anyway and then broke up with his girlfriend; Marianne had also recently broken up with someone. Again, as with the novel and the show, their future is undecided at the end of the story.
Where else can we see Marianne and Connell?
In the second sketch, entitled “Normal Older People,” a much older Connell and Marianne have a very serious discussion about whether Marianne would like to eat the beans on toast Connell has made for her. Full of a lot of “I dunno…” and “I s’pose…,” it captures the characters’ cadences perfectly.
What happened in Normal People Season 1?
Based on the acclaimed 2018 novel by Sally Rooney, the show begins in a high school in Sligo, in northwest Ireland, where the popular Connell and the decidedly less popular Marianne start up a secret romance. Later, they both attend Trinity College in Dublin, where the roles become a bit reversed: Marianne is thriving and has many friends, whereas Connell seems lonely and has yet to find his place. They alternately get together, break up, and see other people but remain friends throughout the course of the show, while dealing with personal issues including abuse, depression and the suicide of a friend. At the end of their time in college, Connell is offered a spot in a creative writing program in New York, but Marianne wants to stay in Ireland. She says they’ll be OK, but, as happens in real life, their story remains open-ended. The novel ends this way as well.
What is the Normal People team up to next?
Although we might not get more Normal People, we will get another Rooney adaptation for Hulu, this time of her first novel, 2017’sConversations with Friends, from the same creative team. The show will follow two Trinity College students, ex-girlfriends who are now friends, who then get involved with a slightly older married couple. Jemima Kirke, Joe Alwyn, Alison Oliver and Sasha Lane will star in the show slated to air in 2022. Although the new show will likely attract many of the same fans, “it’s different [from Normal People],” director Abrahamson told Deadline, “and we don’t want to do a sort of secret Season 2 thing.” So don’t expect Mescal or Edgar-Jones to make an appearance. “I might ring Lenny and ask him to put me in it,” Mescal told Digital Spy. “But I don’t know if that’s going to fly." Mescal has several new projects lined up, including his first Hollywood movie, The Lost Daughter, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal; as does Edgar-Jones, who landed the lead role in the adaptation of the novel Where the Crawdads Sing. Rooney has a third novel,Beautiful World, Where Are You, out September 7, 2021. Wondering what to watch after Normal People? Check out these 9 fan-favorite books getting the Hollywood treatment on film and TV in 2021.
