Gen V, Prime Video’s The Boys spinoff, is back for its second season, and the characters are facing significant changes thanks to a time jump. Also, this is a cast that is grieving the loss of their beloved co-star, Chance Perdomo, who tragically died in a motorcycle accident last year.

The stars say it was a delicate balance in honoring the late actor as a friend, while still ensuring it served the story throughout the season.

Season 2 stars Jaz Sinclair as Marie Moreau, Lizze Broadway as Emma Meyer, Maddie Phillips as Cate Dunlap, London Thor as Jordan Li, Derek Luh as Jordan Li, Asa Germann as Sam Riordan, Sean Patrick Thomas as Polarity and Hamish Linklater as Dean Cipher.

“I think on one hand, those are two very separate things,” Germann told Blavity’s Shadow and Act in our recent cast interview. “What the show does brilliantly is they really are able to center this whole thing on Chance and his existence and his spirit. If you knew Chance, there’s a lot of reverence and similarity between what we are able to say about Andre, and I think what Chance really found important and valuable as a human being. At the same time, it’s impossible to capture his essence fully in something. Having known him, I can tell you that for me, it’s really important to carry his essence with me and my life and some of the lessons that he taught me, and those two things definitely feel related, but they also can feel quite separate.”

Thomas, who plays Perdomo’s on-screen father, added, “I think for everybody in the cast, is that it really kind of made everybody lock in and carry Chance with us in everything we were doing because I think we all understood that he’s a vital part of the DNA of Gen V. You know, Season 1 to however many seasons we have, his is part of the DNA of the show, and so we had to find a way to make sure that that was crystal clear in the way that the writers wrote about the character and the way we spoke about the character as actors. I think that was very important to me in particular. I wanted to make sure that Chance would never be forgotten in terms of the world of this show, and I think that the writers give us a great opportunity to do that.”

Darker storylines in Season 2 of ‘Gen V’

Here’s the official description of Gen V Season 2: “As the rest of America adjusts to Homelander’s iron fist, back at Godolkin University, the mysterious new dean preaches a curriculum that promises to make students more powerful than ever. Cate and Sam are celebrated heroes, while Marie, Jordan and Emma reluctantly return to college, burdened by months of trauma and loss. But parties and classes are hard to care about with war brewing between Humans and Supes, both on and off campus. The gang learns of a secret program that goes back to the founding of Godolkin University that may have larger implications than they realize. And, somehow, Marie is a part of it.”

“Season 2 has a lot of darker story lines that are specific. I felt some of them were specific for experiences that maybe one of us hadn’t had before, and the other has,” London Thor, who portrays Jordan Li alongside Derek Luh, said. “Being able to share how I would perceive something and how Derek would perceive something for these big subjects was really fun to work on, and definitely more challenging than last year. We did the same thing we did in the first season; we just had a little more experience with it now.”

Season 2 of Gen V premiered this week on Prime Video.