[Warning: Some spoilers ahead for season two.]
Beauty and the Beast enters season two with several key changes.
After Vincent (Jay Ryan) was captured by Muirfield in the season finale, things didn't look promising for Vincent and Catherine (Kristin Kreuk) and the fate of Gabe (Sendhil Ramamurthy), presumably dead, was left unclear. The CW drama returns with a three-month time jump, Vincent suffering a (hopefully temporary) bout of amnesia and new villains cropping up. But how does Gabe return to the fray?
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Ramamurthy previews the new season with The Hollywood Reporter, touching on Gabe's resurrection and the physical changes it created, his mission to redeem himself and whether his intentions are really true.
Last we saw, Gabe wasn't in a very good place. How does he come back into the fold?
Well, he was kind of dead. (Laughs.) He is brought back to life by one of the least likely people you would think. (Gabe's physical state also changes dramatically.) That’s something that we explore more of as the season goes on as Gabe is trying to figure out exactly how that happened.
Is that his season two mission, to figure out the "hows" and the "whys" of his physical change?
Yeah, that’s basically what he’s up to in this first portion of the season. It’s really about him trying to [redeem himself] in the eyes of the other characters and he feels the best way he can do that is to at least make an effort to make things right to help them find Vincent and try to cure him. And that’s what he does. He doesn’t know if it is going to work or if any of these guys are going to end up being able to forgive him. It’s one of the things I like about Gabe. This season, he doesn’t have to be there. He is a wealthy guy. He could just take off and go live a great life somewhere but he stays when nobody wants him and they aren't particularly fond of him. The writers don’t make it easy. They don’t say "OK, everybody is going to love Gabe now." There are definitely situations where he is there and the [other characters] make it very clear they don’t want him there. He has to take it on the chin because he knows what it is, he knows what he did. I like that about him. I find that endearing.
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How drastically different is this version of Gabe versus the one we knew of in season one?
There are drastic changes and differences for all the characters. Look at Vincent. He remembers nothing. It’s kind of like a slight reboot of the characters in a way, but it’s not total amnesia for all the characters. Obviously, they have [memories, otherwise] it will just be a new show. That will really become a question for Gabe -- at least, I hope it is. Is he going to be a saint now? I doubt it. I don’t know the answer to that. So far [this season], he is a pretty good guy. I am waiting for the penny to drop. We’ll see if it does. Right now, his main mission is to save Vincent and to help Catherine in any way that he can.
How far does Gabe go in his attempts to win everyone over?
He goes the distance. There are times when he is in jeopardy, physically. Nobody is safe this season because we have more beasts being introduced. We have a new Big Bad out there and we are all trying to find out who it is or who they are. Gabe is in emotional jeopardy too, which we are getting into right now shooting episode seven. There are things emotionally for Gabe that are making his journey very difficult.
There are some notable scenes between Gabe and Tess (Nina Lisandrello) in the premiere. Do we see them working together a lot more this year?
Gabe and Tess have a lot of fun stuff to do this season. We work together a lot on a lot of these cases and Tess doesn’t let Gabe off the hook. They get all the fun, cutting one-liners. Tess and Gabe actually spend quite a bit of time together this season and so that dynamic has been really fun to play. It’s been cool for all of the core characters, Catherine, Vincent, Tess, JT (Austin Basis), Gabe all in a team together united against something. That’s what looks like right now anyway.
Is he confronted about his motives? Should we be questioning his true intentions about why he's helping Cat?
This is something we start to explore in further episodes: "OK, you want to make amends, you want to be a great guy, but what are the real motives?" You’ll see -- through the situations Gabe is put in -- it’s got to be something else. There has got to be more to it. We will find out as the episodes go on what his true motivation is. Brad Kern, our new showrunner, broke the season into arcs. The first arc is the first eight episodes, where Gabe is trying to make amends and as we get to the last couple of episodes in this first arc, other reasons start to come out. The question will be: Are they good reasons or are they bad reasons? You’ll just have to wait and see.
Is there a scene you’ve shot that we should look out for?
We did one yesterday (Oct. 3), which was a big family dinner-type of situation that Gabe finds himself thrust into the middle of; unknowingly he kind of ends up there. The whole thing goes [haywire] very very, very quickly and it ends up being one of the messiest dinners in the history of dinner. It was a lot of fun to film and a nightmare for the props guys.
Having multiple people together around a dinner table often isn't a good thing ...
Yeah, exactly.
Beauty and the Beast premieres Oct. 7 at 9 p.m. on The CW.
E-mail: Philiana.Ng@THR.com
Twitter: @insidethetube
