Ahead of the highly anticipated premiere of the second season of Netflix’s Shadow and Bone next week, Nerds & Beyond had a chance to speak with Freddy Carter, who portrays the one and only Kaz Brekker of the Crows.
Based on Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels, Shadow and Bone finds us in a war-torn world where lowly soldier and orphan Alina Starkov has just unleashed an extraordinary power that could be the key to setting her country free. With the monstrous threat of the Fold looming, Alina is torn from everything she knows to train as part of an elite army of magical soldiers known as Grisha.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity.
Nerds & Beyond: This season does a really great dive into Kaz. We get to see another side of him, and you get to dig into some new things. What was it like for you, expanding upon him?
Freddy Carter: It was really exciting, because a lot of that stuff that we get to play out is from the books — it’s from the source material. So I had all of that information going into season 1 and was playing it all. It wasn’t news to me when I read season 2, that that was the backstory. I discussed it a lot with Eric [Heisserer] and the other writers. That’s what I was playing the whole time.
So to finally sort of see it and kind of actualize it was really exciting. That’s really only the first half of the season for him, it’s a [multi]-episode arc to get this revenge and seek redemption from “someone.” And he gets it and realizes that it’s not everything he actually needs. That he’d been chasing the wrong thing for all this time, and then he has to confront what that looks like.
The second season of Shadow and Bone will premiere on Netflix on Thursday, March 16. Stay tuned for our episodic recaps, review, and more!
