The second season of The Couple Next Door centers on Charlotte (Annabel Scholey) and Jacob Roberts (Sam Palladio), who live on the same street as the characters viewers met in season one. Charlotte is a heart surgeon and Jacob is an anesthetist. They appear to be a happy couple, but cracks soon appear in their relationship after the arrival of their enigmatic and troubled neighbor, Mia (Aggy K. Adams), a surgical nurse with a dark past who disrupts their lives and challenges their marriage. They also face complications with the return of Charlotte’s ex-partner, Leo (Sendhil Ramamurthy), which adds another layer of tension as old feelings resurface, causing Jacob to become increasingly desperate to save his marriage. The final episode, which airs today on Starz, unravels the truth behind Mia’s identity and Jacob’s hidden crimes as Jacob is pushed to the very edge.

Earlier in the season, Palladio and Ramamurthy spoke with SciFi Vision about working on the series, the tense relationship between their two characters, and more.

Listen to the interview and read the full transcript below.



SCIFI VISION:   To start off, for both of you, what was it that made you want to be a part of it?

SENDHIL RAMAMURTHY:   For me, it was just something very different than what I had been doing. When I had a Zoom meeting with our director, Dries [Vos], and writer, David [Allison], and Jen Burnet, our producer, I was doing like a sci-fi kind of - it's based on a Japanese manga. It's called One Piece, and it was very kind of, you know, fantastical. People have powers. And I was talking to, you know, a tennis ball on a stick type thing, and very kind of CGI and special effects, visual effects heavy. And this was just very grounded. I got to talk to human beings, which was pretty cool after having done, you know, kind of a genre thing for quite a bit of the year. And that was the thing that kind of drew me to it. It was a very, very different character than what I had been playing and what I had played in general, I think. He was kind of, he was an adult. I got to play an adult, which was really nice.

SAM PALLADIO:   For me, you know, I spent the last sort of ten years here in the States and working predominantly over here, and I was really excited to get back to the UK and make some great British TV. And I think [it’s] a role that was very different to anything I'd ever played, you know, a character that goes on a massive arc, does some terrible things towards the end, but also, yeah, it just felt like I could use my own accent. I didn't have to layer this sort of false character on top. The writing was very, very domestic and natural, and it just felt like a great choice. And I've been sort of searching that kind of project out, something that would tick a few boxes for me like that. So, yeah, it was a no brainer, really.

SCIFI VISION:   Sam, talk about playing that sort of, I guess, darker part of the character. He gets sort of darker, I guess, towards the end, but talk about connecting with that part of him.

SAM PALLADIO:   Yeah, I think it came from, you know, this sort of jealousy, this pride that he has. He's got this sort of pretty well put together life. That starts to just unravel. And I think that it's, he's not necessarily, you know, an evil person. He's not this mass murderer killer or anything, but I think he's pushed into a world that's just out of his control, and he feels helpless, and he feels powerless. And I think he's sort of blinded by jealousy and professionally and emotionally and just chooses a very, very wrong path. But I think, yeah, to wind up in that kind of emotional state was a real challenge. And obviously, you try and pull from life as much as you can for certain [laughs] roles and situations, but I can't say I've poisoned anybody before, but it was, yeah, finding the reality in that and the tipping point to actually do something like that was a great challenge.

SCIFI VISION:   So, I know you’ve got quite a few more emotional scenes with the grief and everything in the show, Sendhil. Talk about that and do you find that part of it, the more emotional part of the role, more difficult, or does it really not matter?

SENDHIL RAMAMURTHY:   Yeah, I mean, no, I did find it harder, just because I think that people in this age group and the age group of these characters, as well as us as the actors, inevitably are going through or have already gone through kind of seeing your parent or your parents decline and to be a part of - I mean, obviously that's the impetus for Leo coming back in the first place, is that his father is not in very good health. And, you know, at the time for me, my father hadn't been in very good health. So it was a very - I was actually really scared to kind of go into those areas, and I found it really cathartic actually to kind of confront it like that. And, you know, in a way kind of go through those emotions, but in a fictional way where I could kind of - I had an easy way to deal with it. Because at the end of the scene, Dries would call cut, and it was over. And, you know, Madhav [Sharma], who plays my father, who's such a character, would, you know, it would snap back to reality. And I was like, “Oh, okay. I wish I could do that in real life.” And then you kind of find, there was like a little bit of finding ways of coping with things in real life by what I was doing through the character, and that was kind of a really interesting kind of side benefit that I hadn't really thought about, and it just kind of happened. And then, you know, luckily my father kind of miraculously has become much better. So, it's all happy endings. It would have been a happy ending for Madhav, if Sam hadn't killed him, you know? I hate it, hate it when that happens.

SAM PALLADIO:   Jacob, Jacob.

SENDHIL RAMAMURTHY:   [laughs] I'm sorry, Jacob.

SAM PALLADIO:   I didn't kill the actor Madhav, just so we know.

SENDHIL RAMAMURTHY:   This is how rumors started.

SCIFI VISION:   [laughs] Talk about your characters' relationship, because obviously they do not get along. For both of you.

SAM PALLADIO:   Yeah, yeah. That's it, you know, I think Leo is the last person Jacob expects to reappear at this period. I think that the history is very fractured, and there's a lot. I mean, that's probably where his first experience of like deep jealousy and rage comes from is in the form of Leo. So, I think, instantly the hair, you know, the tension's up, the shoulders are up, he's on the defensive right out the gate. I think episode one, you know, he sees him in the corridor for the first time and sort of has to go and take a moment and a breath. So, I think it was really fun to play. You know, me and Sendhil have a great relationship, so playing that tension between the two of them was just really, really satisfying. Some of those scenes, just getting to like poke each other's buttons and really twist the knife and enjoy it. And I think it's just another great, great level to this chaotic relationship world. You've got the desire, the romance, and then this kind of alpha male off between the two of them. It was fun.

SCIFI VISION:   I don't know if you've got anything to add. I think your character was a little bit better at dealing with some of the jealousy than Jacob was.

SENDHIL RAMAMURTHY:   Yeah, because, you know, I think it's a really tough situation for Leo, because he's coming back, and in the end, Jacob won the battle. He's the one who got Charlotte, not Leo. Leo's on his own traveling the world and doing philanthropy and all the rest of it, but he doesn't have Charlotte, and that's what he wanted in the end, and he didn't get it. So, I think that right off the bat, the second these two lay eyes on each other, they don't like each other, and that's always fun to play, like that tension that stays that way between the two characters through all six episodes when you find out what Jacob's been up to, and how he, you know, even if it was subconsciously, it had to be born from this kind of jealousy that he has that Leo and Charlotte may have something that maybe they don't have together. And I think from Leo's point of view, he's like, “Well, what did he have that I didn't have? How come Jacob gets to end up with Charlotte? Like, I'm the one who's, you know, rich and all of this stuff, and how come that wasn't enough for her? Like, what did I miss?” So, that's always there, I think, in the back of Leo's head as well. It's like, he got her; I didn't. So, I gotta do some introspection here and figure out what's going on with myself, which I think is what he's done over the past twenty years.

SCIFI VISION:   Yeah, definitely. What did you guys do to prepare for the roles?

SENDHIL RAMAMURTHY:   Yeah. Lots of threesomes for Sam.

[laughter]

SAM PALLADIO:   Ninesomes, yeah.

SENDHIL RAMAMURTHY:   Ninesomes?

SAM PALLADIO:   No, I mean, one of the most amazing things we got to do for preparation was go and observe an open-heart surgery in Belgium. Obviously, the medical side of the show, the medical drama, is pretty important to the story. So, we wanted to make sure that we knew what we were talking about as much as we could. And for me, that's a role that I've never explored, never had to deal with medical jargon, but wanted to understand it as best I could.

So yeah, it was a real privilege to be able to observe a real surgery and a team of incredible surgeons who strangely were we thought - it was myself and Aggy went in prior to filming a couple of those big operation sequences. And thought we were just going to be very much like fly on the wall, back of the room, you know, like heads down. But the second we walked in, [laughs] the surgeons sort of stopped what they're doing, and “Oh, fantastic. The actors are here. Brilliant. Come on. Hi, how's it going? Nice to meet you.” And, you know, whilst this patient has a chest open. So, it’s just a testament to how amazing and skilled they were to exactly what they were doing. But for me, to speak to the anesthetist and see his world, which is very much, you know, screens. And there's this kind of power trip that we'd sort of alluded to, that the anesthetists have the power to sort of put people under, bring them back, so there's this power struggle. And even the anesthetist I spoke to came out with a great one-liner right out the gate that was that, you know, “We are, as anesthetists, we're trying to keep the patients safe from those surgeons.” You know, it's that sort of thing. It's like, “Well, we're the ones that actually got the patients back. These guys are just chopping them up.”

So, it was like, wow, this is kind of a perfect scene study for what's about to come. And that anesthetist, actually, his wife was a heart surgeon. Anyway, so just, yes, observing that really helps, obviously, with all the technical side of things.

SCIFI VISION:   All right, what about you, Sendhil?

SENDHIL RAMAMURTHY:   Well, a lot of my preparation was obviously Leo's British. So, I did a lot of kind of, you know, accent work to get the accent right. I hadn't done a British accent in a while. So, I brushed up with my accent coach, and every morning would be - I have a preparation where I would just kind of wake up in the morning, and I would beat out loud in a British accent from the BBC website, like whatever news of the day was happening, I would beat out loud. And then, as I would go down, like by the time I got into the car to go to set, I would just stay British for the whole day and not drop the accent, because you're surrounded by all Brits, and you don't wanna be slipping up. So, that was a huge part of my preparation. As far as the other kind of like character stuff, we were really fortunate to have a few days before we started shooting where we got to sit around a table with our director, Dries, and just kind of read through the six scripts and, you know, say, “Hey, I don't understand this. Why does my character do this? Why does that character do that?” And if it didn't work, it was a real kind of collaboration. They were open to changing things and being like, “Okay, if this makes more sense for Leo, then let's go in that direction.” And that part was a blessing. It's always really helpful as an actor to kind of have writers and directors who understand that, and they help you do your job. They help you with your preparation. Sometimes you can be in a situation where they're not really helpful, and I think we got really lucky with this, that me, Sam, Bel, and Aggy all got to just sit there for a couple of days - I think it was two, maybe three days, where we just sat there around the table with scripts and got to kind of work through everything.