Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly on What Makes Us Who We Are in Dark Matter

Dark Matter began with an irresistible nightmare: What if another version of you wanted your life badly enough to take it?

But once you accept that countless versions of yourself may exist, an even more unsettling question emerges. What, exactly, makes you you?

That was the question I most wanted to explore with Dark Matter stars Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly ahead of Season 2. 

We stayed away from plot and spoilers, because nobody needs an interview casually unraveling a season before viewers have had the chance to experience it for themselves. 

Instead, we talked about identity, choice, ambition, family, and what remains of a person when their circumstances change in ways they never could have imagined.

Dark Matter Season 1 forced Jason and Daniela to grab onto one another while everything they understood about their lives and reality itself was being torn apart. 

Season 2 has more room to turn inward. The immediate threat may have changed, but the knowledge remains. Other versions of these people are out there. 

Other decisions they could have made, other lives they might have lived, and other people they might have become. Once you know that, how do you look at yourself the same way again?

For Edgerton, Jason’s identity begins with a contradiction that has always been there: enormous ambition paired with equally powerful insecurity.

“I think Jason, to me, is a couple of sort of key things,” Edgerton said. “He’s super ambitious. And yet, this gets deeper into psychology for me, because I think some of the most brilliant people also, deep down, are the most self-doubting, fragile, sort of imposter syndrome.”

That tension becomes especially important when looking at the different paths Jason might have taken. 

One version pushed his scientific ambitions much further, while another stepped away from them because of grief, family, and responsibility. But Edgerton doesn’t see the abandoned ambition as something Jason simply left behind.

“It makes sense to me in Blake’s psychology of Dark Matter that Jason is, on one hand, brilliant, but then we see another version of him who sort of gave up on that ambition because of grief, because of family responsibility, and yet can’t get over the fact that he never got to satiate the kind of end journey of his creation,” he said. 

“So there’s an ambition that sort of stopped short, which then really feeds into this sense of, ‘Of course I’m a failure.’ And I think that then extends into the way he sees himself as a father and as a husband. So it permeates sort of everything.”

That sense of failure is important because Jason’s scientific ambition has never existed in isolation. It affects how he measures himself everywhere else. 

If he believes another version of himself achieved what he didn’t, that knowledge can’t help but seep into how he evaluates the life he chose instead.

Connelly sees Daniela through a very different lens. Where Jason’s identity is tangled up in ambition and what might have been, Daniela’s is rooted in the life she deliberately created and the simple things that give it meaning.

“I think Daniela is someone who has a lot of integrity as a person,” Connelly said.

“I think she’s a very kind person. I think that she’s someone who places a lot of importance on making things beautiful in simple ways, you know, with food, with making meals, with her family, with community and her friendships, in her paintings.”

There is nothing performative about any of that for Daniela.

Connelly doesn’t see her as someone who creates because she needs recognition or validation from other people.

“She doesn’t really have aspirations to get attention for it,” Connelly said of Daniela’s art.

“It’s sort of like, I think she likes the process of doing it. And I think making their home beautiful, making their lives nice in small ways, and just enjoying each other’s company and that place of home, I think it’s important to her.”

That becomes more meaningful as Connelly considers why Daniela values home so deeply in the first place.

“We learn more about her in Season 2, and that she’s someone who didn’t grow up with that, and that place of safety and a place where home was something just nourishing,” she said. 

“And I think that was really important to her, to build that for herself and for her family in her life. And I think that’s why it hits her so hard when that becomes disrupted, and she feels like she’s part of breaking that apart and destroying it.”

That disruption goes far beyond losing a familiar place. Daniela may still have the people closest to her, but the world she intentionally built around them has been severed from everything else that helped define it.

“All the relationships that were severed,” Connelly said. “We have the family that we, the three of us, me and Jason and our son Charlie, that moved, but there are all those other connections, all the friends, all of the extended family that’s left behind. 

“And she’s lost her place and also her sense of place within the family because she winds up doing things because of the box that she never imagined were possible.”

Even more unsettling, Daniela is forced to confront parts of Jason and herself that no longer fit comfortably within the identities she thought she understood.

“She sees things in her husband that are deeply frightening for her,” Connelly said. “So, yeah, she’s completely shaken to her core. And I think it makes her question all of those things. What is she and who is she?”

That question sits at the center of what makes Dark Matter’s multiverse so much more interesting than a device for producing increasingly unusual alternate realities.

If every version of a person began in roughly the same place, then even the most disturbing versions aren’t necessarily strangers. They are possibilities.

I asked Edgerton how Jason lives with seeing those possibilities in front of him.

How does a person understand himself after discovering versions capable of things he might never have believed himself capable of doing?

Edgerton approaches that question by thinking less about the destination and more about the path that led someone there.

“I think we could be our own success and our own ruin,” he said.

“I’m always fascinated by character and going, well, how does a person get to where they are? How does a person find themselves in jail? What are those steps? What are the steps to a successful marriage? And what are the steps to becoming a CEO? What are all the steps?”

It’s a strikingly simple way to look at the multiverse.

A radically different version of you doesn’t necessarily require some completely alien personality. It may only require a different sequence of experiences, opportunities, losses, and decisions.

“I feel like all of us have the capabilities in ourselves to step upwards, step sideways, step down, or fall over,” Edgerton said. 

“There were certain things in Dark Matter where I’d look at certain characters and go, well, how does this character also do this in an alternate reality? And you could always sort of map out the steps.”

That includes versions of Jason whose lives have gone very badly.

“All the steps from the various versions of Jason, I could see,” he said, explaining that profound grief or losing the thing that matters most to someone could plausibly push that person onto an entirely different path.

That may be one of the most satisfying ideas Dark Matter has to explore now that its characters understand the enormity of what the box makes possible. 

Alternate lives aren’t interesting merely because they show us what might have happened. They force us to confront how much of who we are is innate and how much has been built, damaged, strengthened, or redirected by everything that happened along the way.

Jason and Daniela may encounter possibilities beyond anything most people could imagine, but the questions underneath them are painfully familiar. 

How much of the person you once were still exists inside you? How much did you choose, and how much did life choose for you? And if you could see all the people you might have become, would that help you understand yourself better or make the answer even harder to find?

The box can take Dark Matter almost anywhere.

But wherever these characters go, they still have to bring themselves along.

Dark Matter Season 2 premieres on Friday, August 28, only on Apple TV. We’ll have a full review of the premiere, along with our thoughts about the season to come at 3 am.