How’s this for a pivot?
Best known for the comedy series Friends, David Schwimmer is turning over a new leaf with a scary-fun role in Season 2 of Disney+/Hulu’s top-notch Goosebumps anthology. “I just thought it was going to be a blast,” he admits of his first real foray into horror. “I’m a physical actor, but I’ve never really had the chance to do horror, action, and comedy. To blend all those three was a dream.”
Of the invasive-nightmare variety, of course. After all, this plant-themed season is based on the works of R.L. Stine, the king of late–20th century young adult thrillers. Unlike the first season, which leaned heavily into the bestselling author’s more supernatural stories for the tale of Pacific Northwest classmates terrorized by the sins of their parents’ past, the all-new entry has a decidedly sci-fi vibe.
Schwimmer stars as Anthony Brewer, a botanist and divorced dad of fraternal twins Devin and Cece (Sam McCarthy and Jayden Bartels) who “are staying the summer at the house I grew up in as a kid because I got to take care of my mom who’s struggling with dementia,” he sets up. “So we’re trying to make it in spite of the difficult chapter right now. We’re trying to make it a fun summer for everyone.”
In addition to caring for his mother, Anthony has also returned to his old Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn to dig into a personal, never-solved mystery with some help from an old pal, cop Jen Diaz (Ana Ortiz). “It was a tragic event that happened 30 years prior, in 1994, to my older brother, who, along with three other teenagers, disappeared one night,” explains Schwimmer. “They just went missing and are presumed dead. So there’s this trauma that’s affected Ana’s character and mine.” In the premiere’s opening, we see exactly what happened to the group after they broke into an abandoned military fort and, well, let’s just say this isn’t your campy Scholastic Book Fair Goosebumps.
More trouble crops up when Devin and Cece reconnect with a group of local kids—including Devin’s longtime crush Frankie (Galilea La Salvia), her jealous beau Trey (Stony Blyden), good-guy C.J. (Elijah M. Cooper), and Jen’s juvie-alum daughter Alex (Francesca Noel). Fascinated by the lore surrounding the twins’ missing uncle, the gang goads them into making a trek to the old fort for a late-night dare and inadvertently wind up awakening something in the process. By the end of the premiere, a key piece of evidence in his brother’s disappearance literally attacks Anthony, and Devin becomes horrifyingly tangled up in the more, um, aggressive flora and fauna that has escaped from his dad’s basement lab.
But it’s not just pranks gone awry and plants gone wild in Gravesend. Co-showrunner Hilary Winston (Community) and cocreator Rob Letterman, who helmed 2015’s big-screen Goosebumps with Jack Black, have found a way to root the story in emotion that feels as organic as the myriad plants that fill the sets inside the show’s soundstages in Queens.
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“We wanted to make sure that we were telling true-life teen stories,” explains Winston, who has cast a winning ensemble of young actors. “So the kids, even if they’re running from monsters, they’re still living their lives, falling in love, falling out of love, having issues with their exes. And we wanted to make sure that we kept that alive so that we always had the humor to balance out the horror.”
Off-camera, the vibrant cast of relative newcomers bonded almost on-demand. “They kind of just threw us into a hallway and were like, ‘Be friends!’,” recalls LaSalvia. “We ended up playing a lot Minecraft.”
“I think that we all went in just with really good energy and we knew this was going to be a blast,” echoes Bartels, who happily cops to being well-versed in the Goosebumps universe along with Cooper. “And so everyone was great to work with and it felt like we were a crew right from the beginning.” The insta-connection—paired with Noel’s self-confessed obsession with all things genre and Cooper’s early days as a “Scholastic book-fair homie”—proved convenient for the showrunners, since Letterman “loves to write what he sees,” reports Winston. “It’s his favorite thing.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he agrees. “Hilary and I, even when they were auditioning, we were pairing people up and just seeing how they behaved when we were shooting the pilot. Seeing Jayden and Sam argue [like siblings], that bickering is for real. It’s real. That’s for real.” He goes to admit that, despite his character’s rough edges and conspiratorial mindset, Stony Blyden’s “great personality, off-screen, inspired a lot of plotting.”
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At the same time, the adults will be sorting through storylines that see them dealing with their own demons: Not only is Anthony mourning the loss of a sibling and the metaphorical “vanishing” of a mother slowly slipping away to Alzheimer’s, but Jen is clearly still haunted by the events of 1994.
“Maybe that survivor’s guilt is one of the driving forces of why I became a cop,” offers Ortiz of her character. “And I stayed in the neighborhood to make sure everybody’s safe.”
Having been on set for a day of filming, we can confirm that she should call for backup. As the episodes play out, the lore surrounding both the violent vegetation and the fort itself takes several shocking twists that are smartly tempered by bursts of comedy — And not just the corny botany jokes spotted on several of Anthony’s t-shirts.
“They definitely have elevated it to be genuinely frightening, but Rob and Hilary have captured this tone where it’s never too gory or too gruesome,” notes Schwimmer (who has one of the skin-crawlingest moments in Episode 2!). “There’s something about it with the comedy and how grounded it is that you always feel taken care of. Even though you’re going to get scared, you feel like it’s going to be a safe scare.”
Just please, stay out of the basement!
Goosebumps: The Vanishing, Season Premiere, Friday, January 10, Disney+ and Hulu
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