‘13 Reasons Why’ Season 2: Brian d’Arcy James Teases ‘Emotional Damage’

Brian d’Arcy James is having a busy summer. The Broadway vet is celebrating the premiere of his new miniseries “Manhunt: Unabomber,” but he’s also filming Netflix’s “13 Reasons Why” Season 2. He’ll reprise his role as the father of a teenager who killed herself, and he revealed to International Business Times that the show has plenty to explore even though Hannah’s 13 reasons for her suicide have been revealed.

“To be honest, I don’t know what I’m at liberty to talk about,” d’Arcy James told IBT at the “Manhunt: Unabomber” premiere in New York. “Suffice to say is that I’m just starting to learn what my character is doing as well what the whole story is, and I can say, generally speaking, that people say, ‘How can you do ‘13 Reasons Why’ when you’ve already exhausted the 13 reasons?’ My answer to that — and as what I’ve read has proven to be true — there’s a lot of aftermath.”

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There might be a lot of aftershocks particularly for both d’Arcy James and Kate Walsh’s characters. Hannah’s (Katherine Langford) parents were only given the tapes at the very end of the first season, and they didn’t have much time to process what their daughter revealed.

“There’s a lot of emotional damage,” d’Arcy James continued. “There’s a lot of pieces to pick up and a lot of perspectives of how these things occur that can be explored and I think that’s what [‘13 Reasons Why’ showrunner] Brian Yoerke is going to deliver.”

Fans of the “13 Reasons Why” actor can see him in a very different role in Discovery Channel’s new “Manhunt: Unabomber” miniseries. The drama, which also stars Paul Bettany, Sam Worthington and Jane Lynch, focuses on how the FBI finally caught terrorist Ted Kaczynski. D’Arcy James plays Henry Murray, who played an instrumental part in the Unabomber’s life.

“[Henry Murray] was a real man who worked for Harvard University and was working with the government on a project called MKUltra, which was a pretty infamous program that basically was designed to figure out how they could replace core beliefs of highly intelligent people and then replace them with the desired effect that the government would want in the effort to fight the cold war,” the actor revealed.

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The Northwestern University alum said that depicting a real person in the eight-episode series added extra pressure to the job. “He was a great educator, and this was a chapter that is not as sterling as some of the other things that he achieved,” he explained. “You want to be able to represent something accurately historically and hopefully get the spirit of that person right and not make it a broad generalization of that person but rather a human being with complexity.”

The two-hour premiere of “Manhunt: Unabomber” airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. EDT on Discovery Channel. Netflix’s “13 Reasons Why” Season 2 does not have a premiere date yet.