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SPOILER ALERT! This piece contains major spoilers for the ending of XO, Kitty Season 2.
Though XO, Kitty revolves around several romantic relationships and a shape beyond a love triangle for its main character Katherine Song Covey (Anna Cathcart), lovingly dubbed “chaos queen” by her platonic soulmate Q (Anthony Keyvan), Q and Kitty’s friendship also anchors the show.
Cathcart is the first to acknowledge that her courageous character still has much work to do in figuring out her “very big, very chaotic heart” as well as supporting her friends, particularly Q as much as he has her back throughout the series.
“I feel like Q shows up for Kitty so much. There were so many times watching the season where I was like, ‘Girl, you need to show up for your friends,’” Cathcart told Deadline. “And we all know that Kitty always means well and sometimes, she just can’t help it.”
In the below interview, Cathcart and Keyvan talk about the expansion of the story in Season 2 from Q’s track races to certain scenes that nod to the very first To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before film starring Lana Condor and Noah Centineo, who made time for a cameo in Season 2 of XO, Kitty. The pair also have an idea of what they’d hope for their characters should the show get renewed for a Season 3.
DEADLINE: Season 1 left off with a love triangle or even a square maybe. How does that expand in Season 2?
ANNA CATHCART: [Kitty]’s a lot more confident in herself this season. She’s very motivated to have a less dramatic, less chaotic semester, which I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler alert to say it does not necessarily go down less dramatically, but she has a better understanding of her heart and who she is this season, which I think is a really special place to see her in. She gets to explore what love means to her and explore what she wants her love life to look like in this moment in her life, as well as understand the feelings that she’s not quite over that she thought she was over. That’s such a such a common, universal experience growing up in any stage of your life of trying to understand your heart and thinking you might have passed something that you haven’t or have something pop up that you didn’t expect. Seeing Kitty go through those very universal human experiences is very special in this season.
DEADLINE: Anthony, you get an enemies to lovers trope this season. Can you talk to me about that and filming those track scenes?
ANTHONY KEYVAN: I love an enemies to lovers trope, and I think we did it so beautifully between Jin and Q, and it was so fun to have Joshua [Lee] as my scene partner for all of that. As far as the track scenes go, I did not use a stunt double once. It was offered to me, but I really want[ed] to try my hand at this. It’s a new skill set that I have to learn. Production was so cool about training and everything, they got me and Josh, a trainer who actually was in the Olympics at one point and also did not speak any English, so he was just, like, “No, run. Just go.” It was so intense. We were running probably four times a week, two hours each time, and we were training, learning the proper like, how to get off the …
DEADLINE: The blocks?
KEYVAN: The blocks, thank you. See I don’t even know. But like the proper form and everything. When I first started, I was like, “It’s running, how hard can it be?” There’s an actual like method to all of this, and I got to really learn that, and feel like I was doing something for real instead of just playing pretend. I think it really translated on screen.
There was actually one time though we were filming, and, I’m supposed to win at one point, and the actual runners, the background actors that they had were literal athletes, actual runners. We rehearsed it, and they were all running faster than me. I was like, “You guys need to slow it down.” I remember Josh overheard one of them say [something] like, “It’s so hard to bring it back for him,” and I was giving it 110% but literally, they were like, “Okay, I can go slower I guess.” I’m so grateful to the production for pushing me because there were so many days where I was like, “I don’t want to go to training. Please don’t let me go to training.” And they were like “No, you should do this.” And these days, they don’t really do that for for actors anymore, like they’ll get a stunt double, or they’ll use camera tricks to make it look like you’re going faster. But I was really happy that they gave me that opportunity.
DEADLINE: Anna, there are a couple scenes that call back to the first To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before film that I caught on to, where she faints on the track, the letter and the hot tub scene. Did you know about those ahead of time? What did that mean to you nodding to the first film?
CATHCART: Yes! You got all of them. It was so cool to see how much care everybody put into it because we would have the original scene up on someone’s monitor during rehearsal to make sure my ponytail was in the right spot, and the line of the track was in the right spot. We had a mirrored monitor to see Lana [Condor] from the first movie, and then me on the track to see if it was the same. The little details that we were so conscientious of. I can’t wait for fans to notice that. They were very intentional and subtle.
DEADLINE: Should XO, Kitty get a Season 3, where would you like to see your characters go?
CATCHCART: I would love to see Kitty continuing to explore who she is and figure out what that means to her. She’s constantly dealing with this struggle between being herself and following her crazy heart without causing drama and too much chaos. She’s definitely still in the process of figuring that out. Following her journey of being a messy, loving person is what makes the show so exciting, to see someone who I think we can all relate to that experience in some sense of not knowing what to do with your big heart. I think if she just continues to follow it. I hope she never lets go of that trait because it’s something I really love about her.
KEYVAN: I think for Q, I want the opposite. Q is always so put together, and he’s very sure of himself, and he’s also the shoulder lean on, the rock for the group. I think it’d be cool to see him falter in that confidence and maybe deal with something that Kitty would deal with instead of the other way around.
CATHCART: And Kitty be the rock for him. I agree. I would love to see that reversal at one point.
DEADLINE: Anna, what was it like reuniting with Noah Centineo and Janel Parish in the end?
CATHCART:. It was so so so special, and I was so excited to be back with these people that I’ve looked up to for so long, and I’ve had as role models since I was little. It’s so special, and not only to see them again and to hang out with them as people, but to be back on screen in our characters that we haven’t been together in this space as these people in years. It felt like a combination of comfort and like coming home to them, but also like something brand new and out of our comfort zone, because we’re in such a new space, a new time in our characters’ lives. Having their support, I can’t even explain how much it means to me. They’re both such special, incredible people, and they’re so encouraging and so proud of us, of the show. That means more than I can express.
DEADLINE: There’s this spark with Min Ho the whole time, and then that ending scene, you want them to kiss, maybe not, they don’t. What can you say about that?
CATHCART: I think it’s so fun that we hint at it. There’s so many almost kisses, and there’s just a lot of staring, and the scene that is the dream sequence that Kitty’s in her room, I really hope there’s a blooper reel because we could not keep it together. At one point, I don’t think they ended up using it in the final cut. But they did an extreme close-up on my lips with his finger, and we just could not handle ourselves because of course, it’s so silly. We’re so close and comfortable. The difference between Season 1 shooting scenes like that were a lot more nerve-wracking, a lot more like, like, they felt so like, scary, versus this season was like, “Oh, we got this, we know each other, we’re comfy now.” That was so fun to get to be in that space, but feel a lot more confident in each other and have so much trust. That scene, though, really stands out. We just could not stop laughing.
