‘Home Before Dark’ Stars & EP Tease ‘Intense’ Season 2 Mystery & More Richie Fife Answers

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‘Home Before Dark’ returns for season 2 on June 11. HL spoke EXCLUSIVE with the two main stars as the EP about what’s next after the Richie Fife bombshell and the personal ‘mystery’ at the heart of season 2.

The first season of Home Before Dark ended on one heck of a cliffhanger: Richie Fife may still be alive. Hilde spent the entire season trying to figure out what happened to Richie all those years ago, and when that van is pulled out of the water, Richie’s body isn’t there. HollywoodLife got EXCLUSIVE scoop from stars Brooklynn Prince and Jim Sturgess, as well as creator Dana Fox, about how Hilde and Matt are handling the Richie shocker.

“A whole year’s passed when we sort of come back with the characters, and it’s very clear that Hilde has not moved on at all from the Richie Fife case, so that’s very present in her mind,” Jim told HollywoodLife. “In a way, that may be disruptive and her parents are kind of worried about her, that she’s not letting it go, that she can’t move on. I think Matt’s very worried that she’s going to lose her childhood in the same way that he did. It’s affecting her in a very similar way to how he was affected, so he tries to encourage her to start looking at other investigations and to try and be a kid and don’t get caught up and obsessed with one particular story. Hilde starts to notice weird and obscure weather patterns that are happening in the environment around her. Hilde’s kind of antennas stick up and she starts to dig deep into what is happening in the town and with all this environmental stuff. She just starts digging deep and uncovers all these things about this local corporation in Erie Harbor and how they may or may not be involved in covering up, and then in a crazy way, it all starts to link back to things that happened in season 1. You feel like you’re on some new investigation, but it’s all part of the big thing that sort of all happens in a giant explosion. It all connects.”

Brooklynn admitted that Hilde is having a “rough time” letting go of the Richie Fife case after her leads hit a dead-end. “She believes Richie is still out there, but everyone’s telling her, give it up, give it up, give it up, give it up,” the 11-year-old actress said. “She’s struggling with it. Eventually, her mind kind of tricks her into thinking that some guy is Richie, and it turns out that it’s not. But she sticks on it, and she sticks on it, and then she finally picks herself up. She’s like, okay, I know Richie is still out there. She believes in it, and she wants to find Richie because I think she thinks if she finds Richie she can help her dad get closure and make the town better.”

However, both Hilde and Matt will be busy with a new mystery in season 2, one that’s more dangerous than anything they’ve encountered before. In the trailer, dead birds begin to fall out of the sky. People begin getting sick. This mystery will impact people physically as well as emotionally.

“The stakes are much higher, and it becomes a very personal thing for the family and Hilde, in particular,” Jim teased. “She starts just investigating this weird sort of weather obscurity and then as she uncovers more and more, it becomes very, very personal to her and to her family.”

But don’t forget about Richie Fife. Dana explained that there will be answers to those burning questions about what happened to him as this new mystery ramps up. “I will say that it was really, really important to me that people get a very, very satisfying explanation for a lot of their remaining questions,” Dana told HollywoodLife. “But at the same time, we open the show up with a new mystery. It’s a bigger, more intense mystery that involves more people in the town that can kind of show you that Hilde is going to be able to look into a lot of stories and a lot of people have secrets. There’s a cover-up and people are willing to go to all sorts of lengths to keep the truth from being told. So I will say that anybody who’s excited to find out what that is will not be disappointed by season 2, but they’re going to get a whole lot more than that.” Home Before Dark season 2 will air on Apple TV+.