Danielle Macdonald didn’t plan on playing Helen Chambers again. In fact, The Tourist wasn’t even supposed to have a second season. “We didn’t think that was even a possibility,” she says, still sounding a little surprised. “The writers one day were like, ‘We kinda wrote a pilot for season two. What do you guys think?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah we would.’ So then it happened.”
So yeah, no big deal—just one of the UK’s most-watched shows in 2022, resurrected from a limited-series death and plunked back onto the streaming throne with a passport stamp in Ireland, a darker tone, and a questionable relationship with public restrooms.
“The first time I’ve ever brought back a character in any form,” Macdonald says, still blinking at the oddity of it. “Totally different directors, different crew, different cast, even a different country. It was like I was going through what Helen was going through. We were both like, ‘Where the hell am I?’”
Season two opens with a pig, which is how you know things are about to go sideways. “It’s darker. Immediately,” she laughs. Helen, once the timid cop who trusted her gut even when kidnapped, is now out of her depth, unraveling, and very much not trusting Elliot (Jamie Dornan) anymore. “None of us are perfect,” she says, “We have doubts and insecurities in relationships. It happens. It’s life.”
Speaking of doubt, Macdonald didn’t have much of it when she was chained to a stove in a basement while Conor MacNeill monologued about his dead wife. “Tears falling from his face, I was like, ‘Oh my God, you are terrifying.’ And we’re friends! Like, we were going to laugh about it in three minutes—but in the moment? Genuinely terrifying.”
If there’s any levity in this broody second act, it comes courtesy of the Williams brothers’ scripts and a bizarrely perfect use of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” “They told us we’d be dancing to it and I was like, ‘No really, what’s the actual song?’” she recalls. “And they’re like, ‘No, actually ‘Piano Man.’ I couldn’t believe they got the rights.” Macdonald got to do her dance scene to the actual, legal, living breathing Joel track. “We were like, ‘How are we on camera, dancing, and this is playing? Legally?’ Wild.”
Wild could also describe her fan-level obsession with Blink-182. “I just went to the concert in Sydney—a month ago! It was exactly 20 years since I saw them the first time when I was 12. I got off work early just to go. I don’t do that!”
But before you dismiss her as just a nostalgic millennial with a soft spot for Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, keep in mind she’s also starring in music videos now—namely Jelly Roll’s “Save Me.” “I love music videos. I used to buy DVDs of them growing up. I still watch them. When I heard that song, I said, ‘Please let me do this.’ It just crushed me.” Filming in Nashville, she saw firsthand how music and emotion still powerfully intersect—and yes, she still mourns the death of the golden age of music videos. “They’re not what they used to be.”
When asked if she’d come back for a third season of The Tourist, she lets out a knowing sigh. “It was never meant to have a season two. So the fact that we had a second was already a wild gift.” But if season three ever does come around? “I think it should be somewhere really wild like Iceland. Every country becomes a character in this show. And then we both get to be tourists again.”
She laughs, because she knows what that really means: a free vacation.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
