After over a year-long wait, Netflix's popular series The Umbrella Academy just came back for a second season, and we're finally getting to see more of our favorite, dysfunctional AF superhero family as they try to save the world from apocalyptic doom. (Feels timely, right?)
Warning! Some minor spoilers for The Umbrella Academy Season 2 ahead!
While Klaus' (Robert Sheehan) romantic storyline with a fellow male soldier made headlines in season 1, this season, it looks like there's more room for other members of the Hargreeves family to explore their queerness...
Played by out lesbian activist and icon Ellen Page, Vanya (the black sheep of the Hargreeves fam) finally develops her own powers (and literally triggers the apocalypse), but after being separated from her siblings in 1960s Texas and losing all of her memories, she finds herself in the care (and love) of a woman named Sissy (Marin Ireland).
"In the first season and her childhood, she was treated quite horribly and the end of the first season releases a lot of repressed anger and trauma," Ellen told PRIDE about Vanya's journey so far, and the opportunity to finally explore her queerness in the second season of the show. "Where we find her in the second season, in many ways it was almost like, not playing a completely different character, but more open, more able to access her emotion and then, yes, she falls in love for the first time and falls in love with a woman."
She continued:
"It is the '60s so it was illegal, of course, and considered a mental illness. So there's, of course, obstacles with that storyline. But getting to play her falling in love for the first time and the beauty of that and the joy of that and then hoping to be mindful and sensitive in terms of how to represent the other aspects and mostly, I'm just happy that a storyline like this is in a show that has the reach that it does."
PRIDE also got to chat with the rest of The Umbrella Academy cast, including Robert Sheehan (who says LGBTQ+ fans tell him that they identify with Klaus), Tom Hopper, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Aidan Gallagher, David Castañeda, and Justin H. Min about the new season and the overall themes of the series, including dealing with and working through the trauma you carry in your life and bringing a human side to superhero media.
Season 2 of The Umbrella Academy is now streaming on Netflix.
