The live-action TV series based on the Goosebumps books written by R.L. Stine that was released through the Disney+ and Hulu streaming services last October (read our review HERE) drew inspiration from five of Stine’s Goosebumps stories (Say Cheese and Die!, The Haunted Mask, The Cuckoo Clock of Doom, Go Eat Worms!, and Night of the Living Dummy). More Stine stories will be brought to the screen in Goosebumps season 2 – and over the last couple of months, we’ve heard the names of several actors who will be in the cast of the new episodes. Deadline recently revealed the names of six more, saying they round out the cast. The new additions are Arjun Athalye (Are You Afraid of the Dark?), Eloise Payet (The End of the Party), Christopher Paul Richards (The Kids Are Alright), Kyra Tantao (Zombies 3), Stony Blyden (American Born Chinese), and Sakina Jaffrey (Billions), and the only details that have been shared about their characters are their names. As Deadline reports, “Athalye plays Sameer; Payet is Hannah; Richards plays Matty; Tantao portrays Nicole; Blyden is Trey and Jaffrey portrays Ramona.”
They join previously announced cast members Sam McCarthy (Dead to Me) and Jayden Bartels (Side Hustle) as fraternal twins Devin and Cece, respectively; Elijah Cooper (That Girl Lay Lay) as CJ; Galilea La Salvia (Party Down) as Frankie; Francesca Noel (R#J) as Alex; and Ana Ortiz (Devious Maids) as Jen, “a dedicated police detective who remains rooted in her Brooklyn neighborhood after experiencing a tragic event that involved her friends in adolescence.” Friends‘ David Schwimmer is also in there as Anthony, “a former botany professor and divorced parent of teenage girls who is juggling the responsibilities of overseeing an aging parent while having his kids for the summer.“ The twins Devin and Cece are the children of Schwimmer’s Anthony.
The first season of Goosebumps centered on a group of five high schoolers as they embark on a shadowy and twisted journey to investigate the tragic passing three decades earlier of a teen named Harold Biddle — while also unearthing dark secrets from their parents’ past. The show is taking the anthology route, so we can expect a second season that has “an entirely new cast and setting based on Stine’s iconic Scholastic book series.” Season 2 will also consist of eight episodes, two shorter than the first season.
Season 2 will pick up when teenage siblings discover a threat within their home, setting off a chain of events that unravel a profound mystery. As they delve into the unknown, the duo find themselves entangled in the story of five teenagers who mysteriously vanished in 1994.
Rob Letterman, who directed the first Goosebumps movie, created this series with Nick Stoller, and Hilary Winston serves as showrunner on the new season. Stoller is executive producing the show through his company Stoller Global Solutions. Letterman and Winston are also executive producing Goosebumps alongside Neal H. Moritz and Pavun Shetty of Original Film, Conor Welch of Stoller Global Solutions, and Erin O’Malley. The show comes to us from Sony Pictures Television Studios.
Are you a Goosebumps fan? What do you think of the cast that has been assembled for season 2? Let us know by leaving a comment below.