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Let me set the scene for you: About 30 minutes outside Vancouver, Canada, a van assigned to me pulls up to a mysterious cornfield. The backdrop could convincingly double as a horror film, and it looks like there’s nothing for miles…until the driver randomly crosses the street and zips up a hidden driveway. Suddenly, I’m at a gorgeous house with large glass windows and there’s a director murmuring notes to actors Griffin Gluck and Braeden De La Garza near a pool, next to a tennis court and one of the most impressive outdoor kitchens I’ve ever seen. It may feel like a fever dream, but it’s actually the Chambers House, and filming for the highly anticipated second season of Cruel Summer is about to wrap.

Unlike most TV shows where fans (and journalists like me) can mine previous seasons for clues about what happens next, Cruel Summer season 2 is a blank slate. The drama is an anthology series, meaning a new story starts with each new season. So with only a script of season 2 episode 1 in my hands—password protected, of course—I felt like a viewer tuning in for the first time while walking around the set. But there is a special perk that comes with a set visit timed to the end of production: Unlike everyone else who will be watching the show weekly starting June 5 when it hits Freeform, I had a chance to scribble down as many clues as possible.

Armed with hints gathered straight from the cornfields—largely thanks to the cast, who I spoke to on set—I can finally share just a bit of what is going to happen during Cruel Summer’s second run. This time, we’re traveling to 1999 Chatham, a fictional Pacific Northwest lakeside settlement that hides a lot more darkness than its cute small-town exterior suggests. Ready your detective notebooks because you won’t want to miss a single detail.

The Background

As with most places, there are two sides to Chatham. The first involves the typical small-town folk you’d expect to find, including Sadie Stanley’s character, Megan. Living with her mother and sister, Megan is the typical eldest child: protective, motivated, and ready to do whatever it takes to keep her family afloat.

“In the first timeline, which starts in summer ’99, Megan is your average straight-A student high schooler,” Sadie told me. “She’s obsessed with coding. She’s super smart, super ambitious. She has big plans for her future and for her life.”

Megan’s best friend, Luke Chambers, fits on the other side of Chatham. The Chambers’ luxe household is a world apart from Megan’s, but the two friends’ dreams of getting out of this town are exceptionally similar.

“He doesn’t know who he is, and he has some family drama that’s affecting him. He’s figuring out what his relationship with Megan is. He doesn’t know exactly what he wants to do with his life,” said Griffin Gluck, who plays Luke. “He knows he doesn’t want to follow in his dad’s business footsteps.”

And then there’s the mysterious new bombshell in town: Isabella. The daughter of diplomats, Isabella chooses to skip the country-hopping life for something smaller and more chill in Chatham. “Isabella is a charmer, especially when we first meet her,” said Lexi Underwood, who plays Isabella.

Lexi Underwood.

But as fans of Cruel Summer might guess, this is all just one part of the story. Literally: Much like season 1, the show jumps around to different timelines, following Megan, Isabella, and Luke in three different moments over the span of a year: Summer 1999, winter 1999, and summer 2000.

“In the second period [winter 1999], I would describe Isabella as a shapeshifter,” Lexi told me. “She is really coming into her own, and we definitely see how the influences of other people take over her and especially her appearance as well. In the third period [summer 2000], I would say she is definitely in a redemption state.”

Isabella moves in with Megan’s family during her time in Chatham, bringing the two girls together in more ways than one.

“Isabella has a huge influence on Megan and her personality and what she’s into,” Sadie said. “We see her come out of her shell a lot and kind of coming into her sexuality. She just growing up a little bit. She’s taking more risks than she normally does. But in the third timeline [summer 2000], because of the events that unfold, she’s a little bit darker. She’s just struggling in that third timeline, and she’s just going through it a little bit.”

The Y2K of It All

If there’s one thing the ’90s and early 2000s were known for, it’s fashion. And while the show creators likely had no clue just how much this era would return in style—Y2K is having a major comeback, especially right now—the cast certainly had a blast playing dress-up.

In the first of the three timelines, Megan and Isabella couldn’t be more different, and that extends to their personal style. “Megan is like a tomboy. She doesn’t try too hard with her clothes and just throws on overalls and a T-shirt and throws her hair in a ponytail,” Sadie said, pointing out that her character’s hair also changes. “I got to wear low-rise jeans and baggy pants and some actual stuff from the 2000s, including some vintage pieces they thrifted, which is so cool. I love that whole world.”

Sadie Stanley.

For Isabella, the global girl new to small-town life, clothes are how she shows off status and money. “I am a huge lover of the late ’90s and early 2000s. All those trends we see, like the whole Y2K trend, are coming back right now so I was most excited about the wardrobe,” Lexi said. “I was so eager to get started for the wardrobe and cute hairstyles and makeup. It’s all a bliss.”

Not everyone got as lucky though.…“I think the girls got a little luckier than I did with the whole Y2K thing,” Griffin admitted to me. “The Y2K men’s fashion was like cargo shorts and sandals and flip-flops and then, like, short-sleeve flannels and all this weird stuff. Tons of baggy shorts, which I don’t love. They just made me look like I got popsicle sticks for legs.”

The cast may have had different experiences with the Y2K wardrobe, but ultimately, music was the main unifier. To get into character, the actors made playlists featuring iconic songs that you’ll hear on the season’s soundtrack.

“Music plays a big part this season,” said Lisa Yamada (who plays Parker Tanaka, a local Chatham girl who hangs out with the trio). “It’s really interesting to hear these songs again. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I remember when I was listening to this in the back of my mom’s car when I was 6 years old.’”

The Timelines

Just like last season, Cruel Summer features a gigantic ensemble cast. Some of them might surprise you, but it’s the three core characters—Megan, Isabella, and Luke—who steal the scenes. And that onscreen chemistry is no lie given how the actors bonded when the cameras weren’t rolling.

“We’ll have moments where we sit down and dissect the script together and really dive deep,” Lexi said. “I feel like this is the first time where I feel like I’ve had that working partnership with my costars, where we’re really coming together and collaborating to make sure we’re telling the story in the best and most authentic ways possible.”

But maintaining that authenticity was tricky with three different timelines, and things got confusing quickly. Some scenes had to be rewritten before the actors got back on set. “The script would also go through so many revisions that we’d get a script and we would go to shoot it like five or three days after, but in those couple of days, so much in that script will change,” Griffin said. “We might learn stuff about our characters that we don’t really like, and that did happen a couple of times.”

The cool part? The cast got scripts week by week, so Sadie said that much like in-the-dark fans, the actors would come up with their own theories about what might happen next.

Griffin Gluck.

The Big Mystery

While I can’t reveal everything that happens in Cruel Summer (sorry!), I can say this: Expect drama.

The cast echoed the same sentiment. Sheriff Meyer (played by Sean Blakemore) has his work cut out for him when a body is pulled out of the lake and nobody wants to talk.

“This is his biggest case yet because it’s never happened here before. Crime doesn’t happen in this place, especially this type of crime. We’re family and we all know each other. We leave our doors open,” Sean said. “Him doing his job and trying to figure it out is going to ruffle a lot of feathers. It’s going to most likely tarnish a lot of relationships.”

From left: Sean Blakemore, Lisa Yamada, Sadie Stanley, Lexi Underwood, Griffin Gluck, and Kadee Strickland.

One of the characters tested the most is Luke’s father, Steve (played by Paul Adelstein). As the town rich guy, he seems to have total control over everything…until he doesn’t.

“In dealing with the aftermath, he has a kind of maniacal desire to figure out what happened,” Paul said. “This is somebody for whom the term ‘control freak’ is thrown around a lot. He’s someone who’s very locked down, has a plan, and is very rational. So when something bad happens, he wants to know why, who, how, all of that.”

Exploring this darkness was a special challenge for the cast, according to Braeden De La Garza, who plays Luke’s brother Brent Chambers. “I wouldn’t say I love the guy,” Braeden said. “But to play him? He’s a very interesting and compelling character to watch. You’ll have to watch to tune in to figure out why.”

But I can’t leave you with just that. The show’s first episode is packed with revelations, but remember that moment I spied when I first arrived on set, with Braeden and Griffin by the pool? Well, later I saw Griffin getting dunked by his onscreen brother…over and over and over again.

“I was telling Braeden, ‘Yeah, bro, go for it, like really grab my hair, dunk my head and really just give it to me,’” Griffin confirmed later. “Everyone wants to make sure that it looks scary, but it’s never scary. But I’m always like, ‘Let’s just go as hard as possible, please.’”

From left: Griffin Gluck, Sadie Stanley, and Lexi Underwood.

Take this as your sign to keep a close eye on everything that happens in episode 1. According to Griffin, there were changes made in the editing room that help tie different clues together.

“I think episodes 2 and 3 were locked before episode 1 was because they wanted to see how everything played out so they could drop a lot of hints,” he told me. “They would maybe grab a scene from episode 7 or episode 5 and throw it in there. It’s kind of clue after clue after clue, which really sets up the rest of the season.”

“We had no idea what was going to happen,” Sadie added. “And we were the ones filming the show.”

“We’ve had to bite our tongue for so, so long, so it feels really good now that all the secrets are going to be out,” Lexi said. “Now other people will be able to interpret the show the way we did.”

Freeform’s Cruel Summer season 2 premieres at 9 p.m. ET/PT on June 5, 2023 with a special two-episode opener.

Watch Cruel Summer on Hulu

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