However maybe one of many issues the present does greatest is serve up nostalgia. Whereas season one befell within the early ’90s, season two takes us again to the Y2K period, which has seen its personal resurgence in latest months. Stanley was born in 2001, too younger to have correctly skilled the early aughts, however due to its Gen Z–impressed comeback each culturally and within the style world, Y2K was already influencing the developments in her life by the point the Merciless Summer season script got here her approach. “I’m already beginning to put on low-rise denims and saggy pants, and the Y2K hairstyles and issues are all coming again,” Stanley tells me. “Even the music, it’s all coming again, so I used to be like, ‘That is good. Everybody goes to like it, together with me.’”
Once I ask about Megan’s Y2K wardrobe particularly, Stanley’s eyes gentle up. She recollects the various conversations and fittings that went into Megan’s three very distinct seems to be. “For the primary timeline … it’s a waterfront city, it’s just a little bit coastal, and he or she’s a youthful teenager. She’s a late bloomer, so she’s not likely displaying midriff or something. She’s form of a tomboy, so we did plenty of T-shirts [and] denims, and overalls was a factor I [pushed for].” Stanley tells me the second timeline, winter 1999, is after we begin to see Isabella’s affect on Megan. She’s loosening up a bit, and we see extra midriff and extra of these early 2000s developments. The third timeline brilliantly makes use of style and make-up to indicate that Megan is clearly masking one thing or utilizing her look to guard herself. “That was a complete dialogue and many completely different trials,” Stanley says. “We tried completely different hairstyles, completely different eye make-up, plenty of completely different piercings, nostril piercing, eyebrow piercing, and completely different garments.”
Each new job for Stanley is sort of a grasp class in appearing, whether or not she’s studying from the opposite actors she’s working with or being pushed out of her consolation zone by a difficult capturing format. On Merciless Summer season, she was grateful to have castmate Lexi Underwood by her facet. The 2 bonded immediately and are nonetheless shut immediately. “It’s nerve-racking going into something like this. It’s completely different from something I’ve finished earlier than, and I needed to do an excellent job, and Lexi is such a professional and so pretty to work with and such an excellent scene companion,” she says. Earlier this 12 months, Stanley starred within the movie Someplace in Queens reverse two different trade professionals, Ray Romano and Laurie Metcalf. “To be in scenes with them or simply be within the neighborhood was unimaginable and made me higher,” she says.