The second season of Prime Video’s Good Omens takes us into uncharted territory. With the first season following the story from the eponymous beloved book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, the upcoming episodes, which were written by Gaiman and his co-writer John Finnemore, brings a tale that will be unfamiliar to fans.
The trailer, however, makes clear that Crowley (David Tennant) and Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) are the core of Season Two, with an amnesiac Gabriel, played by Jon Hamm, throwing a wrench into their lives. We also know that Good Omens season 2 features some human characters, particularly the Soho shop owners Maggie and Nina, respectively played by Maggie Service and Nina Sosanya.
I had the chance to talk with Service and Sosanya before the SAG-AFTRA strike about their experience shooting Good Omens, including whether they developed backstories for their characters, some of their favorite Easter eggs, and how their characters’ Earthly relationship compares to the book-loving angel and demon with a heart of gold in their midst. Read on for our full discussion.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
I love your two characters for a lot of reasons. And one is that they’re the earthly counterpart to Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship. I wondered for both of you: Did you look at all at what Michael Sheen and David Tennant are doing and mirror that in your relationship or did you do your own thing?
Maggie Service: Kind of both, for me. [To Sosanya] For you, too?
Nina Sosanya: Yes, sort of, I mean, we have such we have so much information about Aziraphale and Crowley. I mean, literally from before the dawn of time. So we have a whole book, we have the series, and then the scripts that we had, so it was I don’t think it was conscious. I don’t think we had to do anything conscious, because the characters that we were playing, it was all there on the page. Anyway, I don’t remember deciding on any kind of choice that was outside of Nina’s character, that came from Crowley, but I think it’s all influenced subconsciously.
Service: Absolutely. Every every millisecond is influenced.
And your characters’ names are your names, so I can’t help but think that Neil had you both in mind when he was writing the parts.
Service: Well I would hope so, at this point! [Laughs.]
Sosanya: [Also laughing.] He’s made a horrible, horrible mistake! Oh no, what are these two doing here?
How did he pitch the roles to you? And how did you find out about these respective characters, since I know you’re both in the first season in different roles?
Service: I mean, I was literally killed off in Season One. So I just thought I’d had the best time ever, favorite job. But we’re done—we’ve told the story, we’ve done the book. And so it was the middle of lockdown, and I got an email from Neil saying that he was writing Season Two, which in itself gave me hope to imagine a world where we might be making television programs again—that was a gift. And then he went on to say he was writing a part for me and was going to name it after me. I can’t remember now how he phrased it, but it was something like, so that there won’t be any confusion on who’s going to play the part, which again, was just another little gift handed over. And then he said, “Is that something you’d be interested in?” So of course I cried immediately and then immediately said yes, very much please. But I didn’t really know anything else, but I 100 percent trust Neil Gaiman and his very clever brain. So that was a journey that I was I was going to be on for sure.
Sosanya: I got an email and it said roughly the same sort of thing. But it also said, “In a great leap of imagination, I’ve called this character Nina.” And I assumed for a long time that that would change. I remember asking at some point going, “So what will my character’s name be?” And was told, yeah it’s going to be Nina.
Did it cause any confusion on set when someone needed to talk to you?
Service: All the time.
Sosanya: It should have been simpler but was actually much more complicated.
Service: We still don’t know quite how it did. But yes, it seemed to make the whole thing even more complicated, so much so that then people would start mixing us up as well. Or just going, “Maggie and Nina” and oh my God, which one of us do you want?
Sosanya: We just started answering to anything, really.
Another thing I really loved about the second season is the Soho set. Your respective shops look so unique and detailed. For both of you, was there anything in your respective shops—any small little detail or Easter egg or whatever—that you really got a kick out of?
Service: Yeah, almost everything. In the record shop—first of all, there was a little flyer and the props department blew it up and framed it for me as a wrap gift— which says, “Great Music” in big letters and then, “Average Service,” in small letters, which is a beautiful pun on my actual surname. And then it was so perfect for the character to go, “Come in for the music! But I’m sorry, I don’t know, I probably [can’t help], I’m sorry.” That’s really how she would be speaking to them.
But also, all the artwork on the outside was made up by the art department. So the track listings are endlessly hilarious, and I wish it could just be a museum piece and all the fans could come and see. I spent hours there and laughed every single day.
Sosanya: The coffee shop is similar in that there’s graffiti everywhere, which bears a closer look. There are magazines and things that also bear a closer look, so anywhere the camera settles there’s something that makes absolute sense in the Good Omens world of Seasons One and Two. So that’s really nice.
With both of your characters, we get a little bit about their backstory and who they are. But for both of you, did you develop that backstory anymore?
Service: Well deep, I can tell you the whole thing. It was such a lovely detail to put in the script [how the shop was started by the character’s great-grandmother]. So I really mined that, and I asked in a costume fitting if I could have a wedding ring around a necklace. So she wears a necklace in every scene and always has her great-grandmother’s wedding ring. And my grandfather’s watch. I thought that was important, and I picked out a few records that might belong to family members that would just never ever get sold, even if somebody wanted to pay me money. So yeah, it was lovely to imagine the legacy and to honor the history of that. And obviously, she thinks Mr. Fell’s family [Aziraphale’s “human” cover] have been our landlords all these years. Whether it was a tiny bit of magicking, we’ll never know.
Sosanya: Nina’s much more rootless, I think. She’s not wedded to any place. I think she’s a more transient character. I think she’s trying to make a go of this enterprise. And I don’t know: would she stay if this particular story didn’t happen? She’s very differently rooted in that way than Maggie—she has less history with that street.
