In season two of The Institute, which premieres tonight on MGM+, in the aftermath of their escape from Dennison, Luke Ellis (Joe Freeman) and his friends, with the help of Tim Jamieson (Ben Barnes) and Wendy (Hannah Galway), try to find a way to shut down the Institutes for good, while staying off their radar. Meanwhile, the Director enlists a new ally to help with their cause, tech billionare Nolan Reeves (Alfie Allen), while Sigsby (Mary-Louise Parker), who’s also on the run, works to find a way back to the Institute’s good graces.

Stars Barnes and Freeman recently spoke with SciFi Vision about the second season of The Institute, including how Tim and Luke respond to being on the run and the importance of trust within their group. Freeman discussed the value of discovering the story without knowing future developments, while Barnes explored Tim’s protective instincts, his growing attachment to the children, and his disagreements with their approach to fighting back.

New episodes of The Institute premiere every Sunday on MGM+.

Watch the interview and read the transcript below.



SCIFI VISION:   To start off, at the beginning of the season, you guys are on the run, sort of in this flight mode rather than fight, which I feel like is kind of the opposite of what your characters are normally prone to do. So, talk about sort of that and where their heads are at when we start the season.

JOE FREEMAN:   Yeah, I think, you know, we don't know. I like not knowing where it's going, because I was saying this earlier…you don't want to read something in a script that could subconsciously influence decisions that you're making when you're not actually supposed to know this piece of information. So, if I read something in episode six, but we're filming episode one, that could subconsciously prey on my performance a little bit. But no, it was nice. It was like, yeah, the not knowing element was great. That's how I would always want it to be.

BEN BARNES:   But I think your question was astute, because they are both kind of men of action. They want to respond to something. They want to do good in the world, and they want to do the right thing, and they want to do it, you know, in a timely way. And I think for Tim, now in the first season, he doesn't really have connections to people. And I think in the start of the second season, he's come to deeply care about this group around him and sort of be their pseudo father figure. And he is struggling between wanting to protect them and keep them close and stand in the way of danger, but also sort of encouraging them to, and trusting them and their powers and their intuition and to be able to kind of fight back and attack the people that are hunting them. So, you know, that's the kind of inattention that he finds at the beginning of the second season.

SCIFI VISION:   Expanding on that for both of you, I did want to ask how important is it for your characters to trust each other? Because obviously they're not all on the same page, let's say, through a lot of the season, but they still have to work together from different places to make it work. So, yeah, talk about that and about their trust of each other, for both of you.

JOE FREEMAN:   It's very significant. Like they, if Luke and Tim don't trust each other, then we don't really have a group here, you know? Because I mean, already Nicky (Fionn Laird) doesn't. Well, when you find us in season two, Nicky's struggling with the dynamics of having that kind of father figure. So, maybe it's not an element of trust with him, but yeah, we need to definitely to trust him.

BEN BARNES:   Yeah, I think it's never really a question of like trusting whether they want to do the right thing, whether they have the best interests of the world, but it's a question of dynamics and how they go about doing that. And their kind of tactics essentially, because they both want to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, and they both want to fight, and they both want to stand up for what's right. But I think, you know, you're dealing with headstrong, surly teenagers with superpowers, and it's hard to trust that they are going to know exactly what the best, most considered move is. And Tim comes from a military background. He was a policeman. So, he's kind of a little more thoughtful about what the plan of attack might be. So, I think that that's where the kind of like conflict brews.