We hit the Freeform press room for roundtable interviews at this year’s San Diego Comic Con, and got the chance to sit down with stars Katherine McNamara and Dominic Sherwood, where they talked about the 2B finale, Jonathan, where we might expect Clary and Jace to be in coming episodes, and family – all while showcasing their real-life friendship by slowly driving each other insane.
We asked them how they feel their characters have grown this season, and how they might want to see them grow in Season 3, but Dom admitted, “Where do we wanna see them grow in Season 3 without telling you how Season 2 ends?”
Apparently, it’s going to be sad?
“It is gonna be sad,” Dom said. “I hope it’s gonna be sad, which is weird, but like, if people weren’t upset at the ending, I would be kind of pissed. I’d take it as a personal offense if people weren’t upset.”
Kat got back to the question at hand: “Clary especially is trying to mobilize. A lot of what’s happened to her, she’s had to kind of take charge and take responsibility for her actions.”
Dom stepped in, “No. Terrible lies. Lies, lies.”
Kat seems well-versed in shutting down Dom’s wind-ups, and her unaffected “Alright, Dom” naturally relegates him to a head-desking, laughing, choking mess. When he came back up for air, he retracted his statement unsuccessfully: “I agree with everything she just said. Oh, my God, I almost just choked on my own spit. This is it. This is where I die. We’re gonna get it on camera.”
In regards to the new finale teaser trailer and what that means for the remainder of the season, Kat told us, “We see that things get real very quickly.”
“I get hung. I get hung! Did you see that?” Dom said. “I remember getting hung because I remember on the day that being really shit-house.”
When Dom explained the mechanics of getting hoisted up with a chainlink ‘fence’ wrapped around his neck, Kat corrected his word choice with ‘noose,’ which brought out Dom’s inner petty child. Kat: 2; Dom: 0.
“Grr, I hate her so much! Just kidding, she’s lovely.”
Yep. This is all happening in a professional press interview.
It continued, too: “Yeah, it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t a fun day at all. There was a great scene with another actor…I can’t remember if they were…”
To Kat’s interjected “Will,” Dom just about threw in the towel: “No, I…I know his name, sweetheart. I knew him before you knew him. I just didn’t know if he was in the thing or not, so I didn’t know if we could say.”
“Yeah, [he is].”
“He is?”
“Yeah!”
“Great scene between me and Will. Loved it,” Dom finished.
On the what we might expect from the rest of the season:
“It’s definitely different; it’s a departure. It’s really dark, it’s really dark and really gritty, so circling right back to your question,” he said to us. “How does that affect us in Season 3? Where do we wanna see them go? I can’t tell you because I can’t tell you how Season 2 ends. But I have [an idea], and I have ways I think I’m going to connect with other characters and they [the showrunners] just told me that I’m gonna be connecting to a new character more than anybody else so I’m really excited for that.”
On where their characters are this season, and whether redemption is a possibility for Jonathan:
“I think [for Clary] a lot of it came back to family,” Kat said. “At least at the end of [2×16], we saw Clary discover that her brother is still alive, so that’s a piece of that puzzle. She has this new family at the Institute, but any chance to bring her biological family into that, to give Jonathan another chance now that he’s alive, is something she wants to fight for.”
Dom doesn’t let slide the chance to get a jab in at Clary: “Totally, yeah. Even though he’s like a psychopath and murderer. Why not? Just bring him back in! Christmas dinner! Just once a year!”
After a lengthy debate where the two stop being Kat and Dom and become Clary and Jace, Dom finally got down to who Jace is: “Look, I think as far as Jace’s opinion, he is and probably always will be a Lightwood. That’s how he sees himself. That’s who raised him. That’s his family; Robert and Maryse are his parents. Alec and Izzy are his brother and sister, and Max [is his brother too], and that’s who he’s gonna be. Despite whatever his last name might be at any individual time, Jace is a Lightwood.”
Jace isn’t the only one with name issues: “You can tell how people think about Clary by the last name they give her,” Kat added. “Simon calls her Fray, Alec calls her Fray. Some people who think highly of her would call her Fairchild. People who don’t like her, the Inquisitor for a while, calls her Clarissa Morgenstern. And it’s very interesting to see. She has qualities of all of the above, but I think because of who her father is, she feels a responsibility to do everything she can to make up for what he’s done.”
As for developments on the Clary/Simon/Jace drama and whether Clary will confront that soon, Dom told us, “We don’t really see any more until Episode 20, and then all of a sudden the feelings all kind of bubble to the top and come to fruition. That was your question, I’m sorry–”
“No, you’re absolutely right,” Kat replied, “because Clary throws herself into work at this point. There’s things to be done. Yes, there’s all of the relationship hullabaloo if you will, it needs to be sorted out. But right now, there’s this impending danger of Jonathan, of the Mortal Instruments that are missing and that kind of takes precedent at this point. She uses that as an excuse to try and take a breather and sort out her own feelings before she has to confront them head-on, but as it is, in the Shadow World, they always come out.”
“It’s actually the same as Season 1, but the other way around,” Dom observed. “Clary wanted to talk to Jace about being brother and sister and Jace was not having any of it, and we’re in that place again now where Jace wants to talk about the drama in the Seelie Court and this, that and the other thing, and Clary’s not having any of it. So we’re just not gonna talk, really. We’re not good talkers, as people. We’re all really good Shadowhunters who’re not very good at being Shadowhunters. We try. We have a running joke that all of the other Shadowhunters in the Institute are like, ‘Pfft, these guys. They’re the worst.’”
Kat adds: “‘They’re always walking in slow motion, they never fill out their paperwork.’”
“Yeah, ‘And they brought a demon into the Institute and almost got everyone killed,’” Dom grinned. “‘Oh God, the worst.’”
Check out our hilarious roundtable interview with Kat and Dom below:
Interviewer for BSS: Brie Burnham. Filmed by Erin Cuevas.
Shadowhunters airs Mondays 8/7c on Freeform, and Tuesdays internationally on Netflix.
