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When viewers meet Gugu Mbatha-Raw‘s Sophie in the first season of the Apple TV+ thriller Surface, she’s trying to recover her lost memories after an apparent suicide attempt and feels disconnected from her posh lifestyle as the charity-supporting wife of a wealthy venture capitalist, with the couple living in a lavish San Francisco townhouse.

As Sophie continues to try to figure out who she truly is, venturing back to her native London at the end of season one, a key reveal halfway through the second season about her connection to the aristocratic Huntley family helps explain why “striving for status and putting on this costume of affluence was really important to her past self,” creator and showrunner Veronica West says.

At the end of the fourth episode of season two, Sophie learns, thanks to a music box and moment of mistaken identity, that she is indeed a part of the Huntley family and related to her friend Eliza (Millie Brady) who haunts Sophie’s memories and knows her as Tess after they got close when they were teenagers.

For West, the reveal that Sophie is a Huntley is key to both season two’s story and understanding part of Sophie’s psyche.

“There’s this lingering question of: Why was this all so important to me? Why did I seek out a man in finance to try to make these things happen for myself? Where did that deep need come from? And that’s what season two is all about, especially once you understand her true relationship to the Huntleys and the fact that she never felt enough and she had to grow up wondering what life would have been on the other side,” West tells The Hollywood Reporter. “And that’s what Eliza represents to her. There’s just really this mirror of what would my life have been like if I had had all that privilege and all those advantages and getting to know Eliza on the other side of the coin is maybe not so great. You know, that comes with its own baggage. So that was always part of the DNA of the show.”

West previously teased that Sophie’s memories of Eliza and past life as Tess, hinted at in the series’ first episode, were key to Surface‘s “next chapter.” But now she and the show’s stars and producers can share that they’ve known about Sophie’s real connection to the Huntleys from the start.

“When we were talking about this in the beginning of developing the first season, Veronica knew that this was part of Sophie’s past and her history,” executive producer Lauren Neustadter, who executive produces Surface through her and Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine company, tells THR. “She was sort of like, ‘OK, get ready. This might be a little crazy, but this is her backstory, and this is who her dad is, and this is who Eliza is to her.’ Because if you remember those flashes in the first season, those were breadcrumbs that were leading you to the huge twist in episode four, which I think is amazing and thrilling, and you don’t see it coming. Certainly, if you rewind and you go back to season one, I don’t think you would ever guess that that was the sort of genesis of this relationship and how very complicated it is. So I think that was part of the great storytelling from the outset, from the very beginning of the show.”

Mbatha-Raw, who also serves as an executive producer on the show, says she was “in on some of the outlines for subsequent seasons and character arcs from quite early on.”

“Some of it wasn’t all completely fleshed out, but I know in early conversations with Veronica, we talked about season two taking place in London and what that would mean in terms of Sophie discovering her past,” she tells THR. “We knew we had Eliza. We knew that that story and that connection and that relationship with Eliza was was there from from early on, but I think it wasn’t until after season one had wrapped that Veronica really sort of fleshed that out more fully for all of us.”

Similarly Brady says “we knew from the beginning who we were to each other” and explains that they “had an idea of where the characters were going to go.”

Oliver Jackson-Cohen who plays Sophie’s American husband James and has an antagonistic reunion with her in London, adds that even though season two feels “very different” from season one, with its “complete and utter change in pace … that was always the idea in its initial conception.”

And West he says, “had all of this mapped out in her head, previous to even starting shooting a season one, [and] she was very generous with letting us in and letting us know where our characters would go and where the story would go.”

And that generosity extended to letting her British castmembers help her and Neustadter, as Americans, figure out the most authentic way to tell this London-set story.

“I think that’s a testament to how collaborative and humble Veronica has been in this process in acknowledging that this isn’t her home culture and asking us … ‘What would be the dynamic here? Or am I using the right vernacular?’ Or if there were any things in the script that we’d be like, ‘Well, actually, that sounds a little American. We would probably say it like this.’ Or, culturally, it would be a little bit more like that,” Mbatha-Raw says. “I think Veronica is an incredible observer of life and character, so she was really open to all of our suggestions. And I think it was really lovely because it helps us all take ownership of our characters in a way, that we have something to contribute to the world, because we all know London individually so well and so differently.”

West adds, “The voices of any character that any writer is working on are so specific. And I think that’s what makes a show good, is when you have the voice of each character. And I have the benefit of having worked with Gugu for all of season one and really writing in her voice and learning from her. And our director of season one, Sam Miller, would always say, ‘Oh British people don’t say it that way.’ And they schooled me, for sure. But once we got to this season, I put everything I wanted on the page, the intentionality, the emotion, and then I like it when the actors make it their own a little bit. Some of the best moments in season two are [Quinn Huntley actor] Phil Dunster’s ad libs.”

“Gugu is not just an executive producer in title, she is a true partner to us and has been from the very, very beginning,” Neustadter says. “So when we knew that we were going to be coming here for the second season, she was as excited as we were, and we were already in such an in-depth dialogue. … My favorite thing about working in film and television is it’s a team sport. And really I think the season is a result of all of the teamwork that went into it.”

The first four episodes of Surface season two are streaming on Apple TV+ with new episodes released on Fridays through the season finale on April 11.