![\"Paradise](\"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Paradise-677x1024.png\")
<\/div>\nQ- What have you learned through this show in regards to how societies are built or civilizations are falling? And what do you think we could do better in the future?<\/b><\/p>\n
Sterling K. Brown<\/b>: We\u2019re supposed to be in the community. We\u2019re supposed to be in association with one another. People aren\u2019t meant to be splintered and fractured and separated. We should all use our collective skills in such a way that would make the world a better place: I\u2019m good at one thing, Julianne\u2019s good at one thing, Shai\u2019s good, Tom\u2019s good, and together we use our skills to uplift everyone, not just ourselves but as a collective.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Julianne Nicholson<\/b>: He makes a good point. Also just holding people at the top accountable. Paying attention. Looking out for those beneath you too, because what\u2019s affecting them, affects all of us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Shailene Woodley<\/b>: The beautiful thing about the show is how it does highlight community. There\u2019s this idea of the world being on fire and if you have to walk into the woods, who are you gonna walk into the woods with? We have a lot of division in our world at the moment, there\u2019s a lot of judgment and there\u2019s a lot of perception about the Other. I think the show is an invitation to debunk these ideas about what division actually means. When push comes to shove, what does it look like to look another human being in the eye and show up for them.<\/span><\/p>\n Thomas Doherty<\/b>: When you\u2019re in a post-apocalyptic situation, I assume that everyone does resort back to their kind of basic instinct. The beautiful thing about this show is that people are in that very primal state of survival. But you can still make a choice, you can still make a choice to connect to love, to do something good. In today\u2019s world, the situation\u2019s not quite as bad as in <\/span>Paradise<\/span><\/i>, but people are justifying evil behavior, essentially. That divides from what Sterling says, a sense of community.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Q: The character played by Shailene is locked up in Graceland. In real life, in which iconic place like Graceland do you want to be?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Sterling K. Brown<\/b>: I would probably be somewhere like a community thing that has basketball courts and swimming pools and gymnasiums. A place where I could use my body and play games, that would probably be my favorite thing. Ping-pong tables, pool tables and dartboards, that kind of stuff.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/ins>\n Q: Great. What does it mean to get these leading roles that have such unusual gender portrayal? Usually guys get to portray these complex, contradictory characters. Sinatra gets to embody this in this. So what\u2019s it like at this point in your career getting this kind of role?<\/b><\/p>\n Julianne Nicholson<\/b>: It\u2019s always exciting to get to do a role unlike that you\u2019ve played before, to be the most powerful person in the room. As a woman it is a great feeling to have a great thing to put out into the world for people to see and normalize. Hopefully we\u2019ll get more of that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Q: Xavier faced many challenges in the first season. The last episode offers a sense of hope for him and for humanity. What can the audience expect from him in Season 2 and how have those events shaped the way he sees the world now?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Sterling K. Brown<\/b>: He gets a chance to hear his wife\u2019s voice in that tape that Sinatra plays for him. He thought that she’d been dead for three years. Now there\u2019s renewed hope that she is alive. There\u2019s renewed hope that there is life in the world. So he leaves his children behind with the hope of reunifying his family. There is a sense of hopefulness that he enters into the world in Season 2, believing that Teri is there, then he encounters all sorts of things. It is his first sort of entry into the world. We have all these ideas of what this post-apocalyptic world is gonna look like. Whether it\u2019s <\/span>The Road<\/span><\/i> or some sort of zombie apocalypse, we just see people, right? We get a chance to see people either becoming the most selfish forms of themselves or the most selfless forms of themselves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Q: Did working on this TV show change the way you live your present or you look at the future?<\/b><\/p>\n Thomas Doherty<\/b>: Definitely. But not for the reasons you think. For me, embarking on this job, the main thing that I took away was a sense of gratitude. This is the first time I\u2019ve really been in a space with this caliber of actors around me, to see how they all work was one thing. But to see how they all carry themselves in the world and the humility and the kindness that they have, that really had a huge effect on me. I ultimately concluded that my success and where I am today is a result of all these amazing people that I\u2019ve had in my life. I can\u2019t really take much personal credit for it. That\u2019s a really beautiful, beautiful experience in my life.<\/span><\/p>\n Shailene Woodley<\/b>: I just feel so grateful to be a part of this. I was such a fan of Season 1, to be a part of this family feels like an honor and a highlight in my career. It was just personally so fulfilling. Dan Fogelman and Sterling, the way that you guys have curated an environment from <\/span>This Is Us<\/span><\/i> into <\/span>Paradise<\/span><\/i> with the crew that you guys all work with, it was a very familial and comfortable environment, probably the most rare environment I\u2019ve ever been in.<\/span><\/p>\n Sterling K. Brown<\/b>: We get a chance to exercise choice in who we want to be in the world. Regardless of the circumstances that you find yourself in, even if they are dire circumstances, unwieldy and untenable and there\u2019s no sort of options for you, you can still choose to access the highest part of yourself, and be generous. I encourage everyone to take a deep breath in these moments when they think that they have no options and recognize you always get a chance to choose how you respond to the world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Q: Shows like this one, <\/b>Silo<\/i><\/b>, and <\/b>Fallout<\/i><\/b> parallels real-world bunkers being built. It\u2019s a really blooming industry right now. Could you talk a little bit about how that inspired the show and how the show mirrors that world? Why do you think post-apocalyptic dramas have gone underground lately?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Sterling K. Brown<\/b>: Dan had the idea for the show 10 years ago, before any of the other things were out, they all hit at the same time. We have a responsibility to the generations that come after us: what planet are we gonna pass along to them? It\u2019s in the zeitgeist, like: \u201cWell, maybe we go underground.\u201d Maybe we do something, because something has to be done, otherwise, it doesn\u2019t look great, right? I have a midcentury modern home, built in the 1950s right after World War II. It became a popular thing in California to have a bunker in your house. My wife won\u2019t go into it because she says it\u2019s dark.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Julianne Nicholson<\/b>: I think it\u2019s a real call to be paying attention to the people in power. Paying attention to technology and AI, which will reveal itself more as our Season 2 goes on. Paying attention to how we\u2019re treating one another.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sterling K. Brown<\/b>: Those are all the underlying topics of the season. He is on a quest to find Teri and it\u2019s probably the only thing that would\u2019ve gotten him to leave the bunker in the first place. It\u2019s nice to see him on the outside, going after what he wants while we get a chance to see the repercussions of what happened at the end of Season 1 inside of the bunker because it\u2019s a fascinating world, both of them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Q: How do you keep your writing on and keeping everybody so hooked onto your shows? And why Graceland?<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sterling K. Brown<\/b>: I didn\u2019t write the shows. Let me not take too much credit for the writing and the world-building. That said, maybe I inspired something, but Dan Fogelman, John Hoberg, our writers are second to none. They\u2019re absolutely fantastic. What they did in a really interesting and provocative way is that they introduced us to a world in Season 1, and then we recognize that there\u2019s a world outside of that world. So things don\u2019t get stale. With Graceland, we get a chance to use a lot of the King\u2019s music in a very similar, playful way where you use classics of his and remix them, it has a haunting tone to it, right? Graceland is an ultimate inspiration for me? I\u2019m a Black man from St. Louis, Missouri, probably not. But I do like when you flip something on its head and you introduce it to an audience in a brand new way.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Julianne Nicholson<\/b>: Sterling is the co-captain. Sterling very much sets the tone of every day, leading the charge with his generosity, his heart, his talents. We just fall in line, he\u2019s a huge part of how the shows come together.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Shailene Woodley<\/b>: Thomas and I met once before we had our first scene together, which actually was very helpful in a way, because these two people didn\u2019t have a relationship with one another. I play someone who was in solitude for many years. The physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological intimacy that they chose to exchange with one another is one of the biggest offerings of vulnerability, an exchange of spirit that any of us could possibly go through. The fact that we didn\u2019t really know each other really lent to this desire to just\u00a0 throw caution to the wind and look each other deeply in the eye, and choose to share all of what we had to share in those moments.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/ins>\n Q: Did you learn any survival skills you didn\u2019t know and you want to share with us?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Julianne Nicholson<\/b>: I wouldn\u2019t do so well having to survive an apocalypse, I\u2019m not gonna lie. My mother\u2019s an herbalist and my stepfather\u2019s a woodworker and they\u2019re both wilderness guides and they would always take us camping. I would just go wherever they were and just take orders.<\/span><\/p>\n Q: Sinatra is such a unique character, we see that megalomania playing out almost every day in real life. How do you divorce yourself from that when you leave the set?<\/b><\/p>\n Julianne Nicholson<\/b>: That\u2019s so funny, because we have different feelings about the characters that we play than how the audience perceives them. When we were making this show, it was pre-Trump presidency. It was pre-having people in the Oval Office that weren\u2019t elected to be there. The role of Sinatra took on a much deeper and even more sinister take when life was imitating art. Having been doing this now for a few years,\u00a0 the character never completely goes away but it\u2019s easier for me to leave her on set. I don\u2019t want to live in her world.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to live in her mind, her experience, so I try to leave her behind.<\/span><\/p>\n Q: Your character operates in a space that feels both isolated and emotionally charged, and her presence has an outsized impact on the story. What drew you to that kind of concentrated, high-stakes role?<\/b><\/p>\n Shailene Woodley<\/b>: I didn\u2019t see it as necessarily a concentrated, high-stakes role. I saw her as just a human being doing the best she could in the situation that she was in. When you\u2019re fortunate enough to have a screenwriter like Dan Fogelman and his team of writers that he has around him create and curate a character that\u2019s so thoughtfully and meaningfully prescribed, my role was really professionally listen to everything that Annie was experiencing based on her environment, based on the situation around her. The thing that I loved most about her was that her mind worked in a very analytical and linear way, it actually allowed her to process her experience without allowing emotions to inhibit the way that she perceived survival. The way that she perceived her own willpower to forge forward. She\u2019s a character that I actually learned a lot from. I feel like I\u2019m a more still, patient version of myself after playing Annie.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Q: Will the series continue to focus on more recent events as everything is much more complicated than in the first season?<\/b><\/p>\n Sterling K. Brown<\/b>: The show has its own mythology. It will continue along its own mythology, but hopefully there will be reverberations of things that are happening in society right now. With any good genre storytelling, you\u2019re reflecting on the world in which you live while also giving them a degree of separation so that you can see it from a distance. It doesn\u2019t feel so personal, but you\u2019re actually able to say: \u201cHey, maybe we\u2019re not so far off from this thing that we\u2019re watching\u2026.\u201d Paradise is entertaining and takes us outside of the world, but it\u2019s also commenting on the thing that we\u2019re going through now.\u201d So it\u2019s its own mythology.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n If you like the press conference, share your thoughts below!<\/b><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Paradise03-300x200.jpg\")
@Courtesy of Hulu<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Paradise02-300x169.webp\")
@Courtesy of Hulu<\/p>\n