A botched suicide in the San Francisco Bay leaves a woman with no memories. Where do you go from there?
In “Surface,” which premiered last week on Apple TV+, there are more questions than answers.
“She’s having to look to everyone else around her to create her reality,” Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who stars as Sophie, told the Daily News.
“If you’re being told one thing and you don’t know who to trust, yeah, that’s going to make you question your sanity, question your reality.”
Fresh off her almost drowning, Sophie is gifted — or cursed — with a new start. But instead, she goes back into her old life: a gorgeous apartment, a gorgeous husband (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). She relies on everyone else to fill in the blanks, to tell her who she is, where she came from, where she wants to go.
“The life that Sophie wakes up into seems pretty perfect,” showrunner Veronica West told The News. “She has this doting husband who loves her, she has friends who care about her, she lives in this aspirational house in this perfect city with this perfect walk-in closet ... and she immediately is not fulfilled by that.”
But as Sophie digs, the world she’s been told is hers begins unraveling, aided by a mysterious detective (Stephan James).
For Mbatha-Raw, the 39-year-old British actress who recently appeared in “The Morning Show” and “Loki,” playing a woman on the edge is nothing new. Last year, she starred in HBO Max’s “The Girl Before” as a traumatized woman chasing the ghosts of her new landlord. Even in “The Morning Show,” Apple’s drama starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, her character, head booker Hannah Shoenfeld, is made at times to feel like she’s the crazy one.
“Surface” doubles down on that and plays into the stereotypes: you assume the husband is sketchy, then the best friend (Ari Graynor), then the stranger lurking in the shadows who says he has answers. You assume the burner phone hidden in the purse in that gorgeous walk-in closet calls a secret boyfriend or a drug dealer. You assume everyone is lying to Sophie, either because they’re hiding something or simply because they can.
“How much of this is for him? How much of this is for her?” Jackson-Cohen, the 35-year-old London-born actor who plays the charming husband James, told The News. “That’s quite the fine line ... that delicate balance in relationships of the secrets you do keep from one another. Is it to not hurt them or is it because of something else going on?”
The questions drive Sophie bonkers, but so do the answers. She follows dead ends and trails that go in circles until she’s losing her mind, all while everyone around her is telling her to just accept this life she’s fallen back into. She begins to doubt everything, including whether her suicide attempt was actually suicide at all.
“She is the investigator but she’s also the investigation,” West said. “She is discovering these things from her own past, her own relationships, her own mistakes.”
But Sophie’s past is not as far out of reach as she thinks. There’s no outrunning your history, she finds out. But even without knowing where she’s been before, she keeps drifting closer to where she was going all along.
“Ultimately, she’s left with a lot of choices and, like in life, when you have more information, do you make better choices?” Mbatha-Raw told The News.
“If you’re given a completely blank slate, is it a fresh start? Are you able to make good choices? Or are you inherently destined to make the same choices if everything was wiped away? Is it the core of who you are or can you change?”
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