The multiverse is having a moment. From Marvel’s upcoming Doctor Strange: Into the Multiverse to the Daniels’ mind-bending epic Everything Everywhere All At Once, our favorite actors are plunging their tiny little human brains into billions of warped worlds. Nowadays, to dive into the multiverse is as much an indelible cinematic experience as falling in love with plucky YA heroines in those 2010s franchises, or jumping out of your seat while watching The Arrival of a Train in the late 1800’s.
Which is all to say: Everyone’s watching. So the Amazon series Undone is nothing if not on trend—the funky Rotoscope series first played in the multiverse back in 2019.
In the first season of Undone—which you might want to rewatch before heading into Season 2, considering it was released three years ago and introduced so, so many twists and turns—Alma (Salazar) realizes she has genetic time-traveling/world-hopping abilities. She turns back time, revives her once-deceased father (Bob Odenkirk), and lives happily ever after. Kind of. Season 2 sees Alma uncovering her mother’s (Constance Marie) secrets, and taking a journey even more dangerous than the first: into her mother and grandmother’s generational trauma.
When Rosa Salazar read the scripts for Season 1, she was excited by the thought of a table read— “Have you ever heard an actor say that?” she asks me, shocked by her own words—for her new project. Although it was a stripped down production due to COVID protocols, Salazar says she was just as excited: “I binged these scripts.”
Salazar’s recent projects, namely Alita: Battle Angel and Brand New Cherry Flavor, have made it big on social media. But Undone, surprisingly, remains an underdog in the vast streaming landscape, even with the alluring multiverse aspect. (Russian Doll? Barry? Ozark? The Flight Attendant? Undone faces fierce competition for attention on April’s stacked release calendar.)
But that won’t stop Salazar from pressing her fans to get Undone to the top of the trending list. “You won’t really catch me out there promoting stuff on the streets as much as I promote Undone,” she tells me. “I’ve sat and made people watch me in it.”
The most dedicated Undone fan of all, Rosa Salazar, took us through the many puzzles of Season 2.
How was it jumping back into Season 2 after a massive delay? Did you remember all those wicked twists and turns of Undone?
Yes, I did! I am incredibly proud of this show. I did remember, it’s very dear to my heart.
Jumping in after a few years? Hisko Hulsing, the director, puts it the best way. He says that in Season 1, we were trying to drive a car while building it, but no one knew what it was going to be. No one knew what we were doing, really. We thought we had something special, and we did! So with the second season, we thought—this is pre-pandemic—we were like, “Alright! Now we’ve got this Maserati. Let’s put the top down and put it on cruise control, baby.”
But there was the pandemic, too.
Aaaand then the pandemic hit. So we were like, “Uh oh. We’ve got a boot on our car. What is happening?” But again, it really dovetails with the nature of Undone anyway, this exploratory project where you really use your imagination a lot. There’s a lot of in-the-moment problem solving and it’s very fluid in that way. We still jumped back in. We just had to do some clandestine tests on new ways to shoot things in parking garages, and try to get greenlit during the pandemic to shoot it. Of course, I didn’t know what the new adventure would be until I got the scripts. And then I was even more jazzed to get back in there.
What was your reaction when you read the scripts for Season 2?
Oh my god. I binged these scripts. People wait for the second season of their show to come out, I’m like, “Give me that script!” It was the same thing in Season 1. You never worry about, “Is this story going to take a turn? Are these scripts going to fall off?” You know it’s going to be deep. You know it’s going to be expansive. You know it’s going to be amazing. You know it’s going to ask all kinds of philosophical questions. You know you’re going to be enveloped by this story.
Season 1, I was just like, binging these scripts, and I couldn’t wait to get to a table read. I mean, have you ever heard an actor say that? I couldn’t wait. Season 2, we didn’t really get to do table reads, but it was the same kind of excitement: just electrifying, reading these scripts.
Ok, so let’s talk about those scripts. In Season 1, Alma’s abilities are up-in-the-air. Does she have them? Does she not? In Season 2, it’s a bit more tangible: they’re there.
Everything is up for debate. Even in our normal, everyday, you-and-me lives, everything is up for debate. Perspective is a very tricky thing and it’s a very subjective thing. In my opinion, we’ve landed somewhere in between. She clearly does have abilities. They run in her family. This is if she’s even gone into that tomb at all. You know what I mean?
This is also true.
She could still be sitting there to this day. This could all be an over-the-rainbow experience. But in this timeline, if we take some things as given—which, with Undone, we never really can—but if we can, I would say there’s some level of a combination of the two. She exhibits characteristics of someone who is unwell, who is unbalanced. Whether that’s a diagnosable mental disorder or illness from the DSM [the American Psychiatric Association’s manual of mental disorders], or if it’s just a behavioral thing stemming from trauma in that timeline, or all the timelines—it’s that in combination with, yes, she does have abilities, and they run in her family. Clearly, Becca has abilities. In this timeline, in this story, in this instance, I believe that both are at play.
We see Alma really going external. She’s very much concerned with all the external things happening in her life, in her lineage, and she wants to fix it. She wants to fix that, she wants to fix this. Alma 1 was on the backburner, like, “I don’t know about this. This is scary.” Alma 2, to an incessant degree, bordering on obnoxious, is like, “Now we’ve got the powers. Everybody speed up to my speed. Let’s fix this. Let’s fix this. Let’s fix this.” In that, we see a behavioral dysfunction. Here’s someone who is constantly trying to fix things outside of herself.
And what about the future—Season 3?
If there were a third season, we would go into the expansive universe within her. Because that is the one thing that, wherever you go—time, space—there you are. That’s the only thing that truly can change. There is some level of illness, and there is some level of shamanic ability. But it remains to be answered.
Two of your projects, Alita: Battle Angel and Brand New Cherry Flavor, have gone incredibly viral on social media. If you could make the internet spotlight one aspect of Undone—a scene, a performance, etc.—what would you pick?
Really, I want people to take away its major philosophical inquiries. Asking people to expand their consciousness is really what we’re all about. We’re on that trip, so to speak, and we’re really giving it to audiences through the art, through the emotional writing, through the impeccable directing, through the Rotoscope and classically-trained oil painters. Also, with the actors, we’re all giving it over to the audiences.
This goes back to the question, “What do you make of this?” The main thing to take away from something like Undone is to just be curious. The only thing we owe each other on this planet is to be open and curious.
