Sadie Stanley and Lexi Underwood Preview the Next Chapter of ‘Cruel Summer’

Sadie Stanley and Lexi Underwood star in season 2 of Cruel Summer, which debuts on Monday, June 5 at 9 PM EDT with a special two-episode premiere. New episodes will then air at 10 PM on Freeform.

Set in an idyllic waterfront town in the Pacific Northwest, the next chapter of “Cruel Summer” follows the rise and fall of an intense teenage friendship. Approaching the story from three different timelines surrounding Y2K, the season twists and turns as it tracks the early friendship between Megan, Isabella, and Megan’s best friend Luke, the love triangle that blossomed, and the mystery that would impact all of their lives going forward.

“Number one, what I love about season two is that tonally, it’s the same, we follow the same format but new characters, new mystery, and it’s, of course, set in Y2K. So I think that it’s just a complete — you can’t even compare it to season one. Something that’s so beautiful about this season specifically is that we’re really exploring the female friendships,” Underwood told me. “In season one, the girls, their characters, they were kind of like two worlds apart, but in this season, the girls, they’re together constantly, they’re going through all these hardships together. And so, being able to really navigate and talk about female friendships and the importance of them and what it truly means, like what the actual definition of a ride or die means and how you show up with that, I think that that’s something that I feel like a lot of fans will be intrigued by this season.”

Stanley shared, “They [the three timelines] worked so well, that format worked so well in the first season and it just seemed like a lot of fun as an actor to get to play three different timelines and essentially almost three different characters because our characters do change so much in each timeline. So that was really intriguing to me and I resonated with Megan a lot. She’s kind of just a regular teenage girl, but she did have to grow up really fast, because she has a single mom and a sister to take care of, and got a job at an early age to help with bills and has all these big plans for her life.”