The Freeform hit anthology series Cruel Summer created by Bert V. Royal follows a different group of characters each season with a new mystery to uncover. The first season premiered in 2021 and followed two teenage girls in the mid-1990s where Kate (Olivia Holt) goes missing and Jeanette (Chiara Aurelia) seemingly takes her place. In season two, which kicked off in June of this year, the intense friendship between teens Megan Landry (Sadie Stanley), Isabella LaRue (Lexi Underwood), and Luke Chambers (Griffin Gluck) leads to one being murdered and the other two as the prime suspects in the early 2000s.
Lisa Yamada stars in season two as popular musician Parker Tanaka and close friend to Megan and Luke. With a show like Cruel Summer, fans often take to social media to trade ideas on where the story is going. Lisa and her cast mates are the same, but on a more personal level. When speaking with Popternative, Lisa shared how she talks about theories surrounding the show:
“I mean it’s so exciting. I feel like we’ve touched base about this before but I love true crime and the horror genre so much, so it was so fun to be able to be a part of something like that, but I mean the cast and I we were along for the ride so it’s like really funny seeing everyone so invested in all the theories on Twitter and Reddit. […] The cast and I we would receive an episode and before the table read, we would have a group FaceTime of a group chat and we try to theorize who done it and then you get to the last two pages of the script and you’re like, ‘oh wait so who is it then?’ Everything that we thought we knew is not right so we got to go back to the drawing board.”
Yamada also shared how fully immersed you become when watching Cruel Summer. “And I feel like there’s just probably so much…there’s probably like a big fan base around it because you feel you’re part of the show, you’re in for the ride. You’re not just watching people on screen; you’re like a detective trying to figure it out with the show.”
Watch the full interview with Lisa Yamada below.
New episodes of Cruel Summer air on Freeform Mondays at 9pm ET and are available to stream on Hulu.
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Amber Dover is a multimedia journalist with over a decade writing about pop culture. Cat mom with a deep love of horror, you can follow Amber at @Glambergirlblog on Instagram and Twitter.