Sweet Tooth Showrunner on the “Incredible Challenges” of the Final Season

Sweet Tooth‘s third and final season was a secret for over a year, but the last batch of episodes arrive on Netflix this week. Based on the DC Comic series by Jeff Lemire, the show will bring its narrative to a close and become the rare comic book adaptation that has managed to almost fully tell the entire story from its source material. There are both changes from the Sweet Tooth comic and some key characters that finally make their presence known, and we spoke to series showrunner and executive producer Jim Mickle about bringing these things to life and the challenges that came with only eight final episodes.

One of the biggest additions to Sweet Tooth in season 3 is Kelly Marie Tran, joining the series as Rosie (whose name was a total coincidence and not a reference to her role in Star Wars: The Last Jedi; “Sometimes you come up with character names and you’re sort of like, that’s just a TBD for now. But that one just stuck with that character,” Mickle says), the daughter of Rosalind Chao’s Helen Zhang who has a major role in the new episodes. These two joining the series so late in its run could be an intimidating prospect, especially since their characters have pivotal parts to play. Mickle tells us that neither Tran nor Chao backed down from the challenge

“I think with her and with Rosalind (Chao), it’s so hard. It’s a specific show. It’s ambitious, obviously, in what it’s doing, and it’s so hard. I can’t imagine being an actor and jumping into something into a third season where it’s one thing if you’re a really side supporting character, but to jump into something that has really consequential story and season hanging on it; my hat’s off to their bravery and their ability to do it and not seem flustered at all, which they never were. I don’t know if they were inside. I think a big part was freeing, that we’re not doing the Last Men’s story, we’re not doing the Abbott story. This is something completely brand new. This is really a story about motherhood and the best and the worst of it, and just again, relating to it on a personal level for both of them. So that was a big part of it. I think Kelly loves being able to do the action. She’s an incredible sweet kind of goofball. And so I think when she gets to sort of play a badass, I think she really gets to have some fun.”

Another major addition was teased at the end of Sweet Tooth season 2, the pack of Wolf Boys that Zhang is using to track down Gus. The pack is brought to life by four young performers including Shin Tanaka, Joseph Malele, Isaiah Ilo, and Amie Donald, who you might know as the monkey-hybrid from Sweet Tooth season 2 or her most famous role, M3GAN. Bringing these characters to life for Sweet Tooth season 3 was an “incredible challenge” according to Mickle.

“I think coming into season two, the big challenge was how do we pull off all these hybrids? Season three, the real challenge is how do we pull off these wolf boys, especially because having them on all fours. They had a weird thing on their heels in order to get their heels to go the way dog’s go, it meant they couldn’t walk on two legs between cuts. So you’d call cut, and then adults would come in and pick them up and then carry themand put ’em back to their first position. So it was the weirdest thing on set constantly. Then when their faces go slack and animatronics are off, they’re just like these weird gaping masks. So everything about it is weird, and then those moments that it all comes together, it’s so cool when it works. Every director was sort of like, ‘okay, guys, this is going to be really hard.’ You shoot with ’em in small bursts. It’s really complicated. You’ve really got to plan this stuff out ahead of time and know what you’re getting, but the end result is super cool, and it is. I’m so happy with how that stuff came out.”

With season three, Sweet Tooth also continues a trend it has explored in past episodes by using its world to tell allegorical stories that are very prescient for the modern era. The new episodes of the series dive into this head first in major ways, spinning narratives that continue to expand Gus’s view of the world while also hitting close to home for viewers at home.

“Every season I feel like when it became about who is Gus, what is he going to see? Season two, I remember going in and being like we can’t write the Gus of season one. He’s changed so much since season one. And then it was the same thing coming out of season two. We got into season three, and we started kind of going down that road, and it just felt like, no, we’ve told this story with Gus, even though it’s only a couple weeks of story time, he’s actually experienced so much. So a big key, I think, with three was showing him the gray areas of the world because he had sort of seen the worst of the last men and all that, but now is going in and really seeing the complicated version of humanity and who they are and how they try to be good, but they screw up.’

“And so that became a real framing device for the show, which is like, let’s show Gus, let him see what human beings do in their final, how they react and what might be their final few minutes of existence. And that was really fascinating to sort of look at all the different, the reactions to how people dealt with Covid and just all the last couple of years of people was really interesting to look at and go, let’s just show that to Gus in a very unvarnished way and put it through his eyes. And that was, once that happened, it was everything sort of clicked into place for season three.”

Sweet Tooth season 3 arrives on Netflix this Thursday, June 6.