If Tiffany Haddish and Zach Woods have their way — and they just might — they’d have audiences becoming detectives and solving murder mysteries on their own. Well, at least at home from their couch, that is. The playful costars of season two of The Afterparty not only work well together, but bounce creative ideas off each other with ease during interviews. At least in this exclusive interview with MovieWeb, which you can watch above.

But that’s the joy of their hit Apple TV+ show, anyway. It’s a fun and engaging series, as festive as it is light-hearted, yet manages to stay on point. In this inventive murder mystery show, it’s all about the whodunit — with a twist. Every episode plays out in another genre.

Season two is packed with hilarity and thrills. Haddish returns as Detective Danner, as does Sam Richardson and Zoe Chao. The murder in question? Chao’s Zoë attends her sister Grace’s (Poppy Liu) wedding, but the groom (Zach Woods) is found dead by dawn. Time to grill the suspects.

Anna Konkle (PEN15, The Drop), Jack Whitehall, Ken Jeong, Paul Walter Hauser, John Cho, Vivian Wu, and Elizabeth Perkins pepper this season’s ensemble. Tiffany Haddish and Zach Woods shared more with MovieWeb in the exclusive video interview above, and you can read more highlights below.

Let There Be Murder
Apple TV+

One of the winning components of The Afterparty first season was the watching Tiffany Haddish’s Detective Danner attempt to solve the murder. Haddish is a hoot — in anything. Her comedy chops are on full display in season two, where, sometimes it feels as if she and her costars delved into improv. It’s as if the director went, “Wait, that’s good. Let’s keep it in.” Season two’s team plays well with each other.

“What I love most about Detective Danner is that she is the type of detective I would want to be investigating me, because she’s easy to talk to,” mused Haddish. “She pays attention to you. She’s observant, and you feel safe in our presence. That’s the kind of detective I would want to be investigating me. [The writers] know me and write it for me. It’s a lot of ‘me.’ And so, when we do play… and we do, because everyone on this cast is very good at improv… we dive right in. It snaps and it’s funny. It has a lot of heart. I’m all about projects that have heart because I have one.”

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Meanwhile, Zach Woods plays stalwart Edgar, the lizard-toting rich groom who never makes it to the honeymoon. “I liked it a lot,” quipped Woods of playing a character who winds up dead. “Although I was annoyed. I was so excited when they called me about it. It was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna get to do a series with Tiffany Haddish. And then I just had to lie there when she was in the scene.” He laughed. “But aside from that…”

“I have to say, of all the people I’ve worked with,” injected Haddish:

I’ve never been around someone playing dead so good. [Zach] did that breathing exercise or something because I couldn’t even tell that he was breathing. His eyes were open. And he didn’t blink. Nor did his pupils dilate. I think he astral projected into the corner of the room, watching it.

Creating a Mystery Between the Laughs
Apple TV+

Similar to last season, The Afterparty holds plenty of surprises. And several major plot twists. Some of them totally send the mystery in directions you wouldn’t have thought things would go. But that’s the point. “I think viewers will be surprised about the different genres we go into,” noted Haddish. “And I think that they will be surprised about what I can do with food.”

She’s referencing, humorously of course, the many scenes that find her noshing away and other scenes that, well… best to experience that on your own. “It gets very sexy,” Woods chimed in.

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When asked what she hoped viewers walk away feeling from this round of The Afterparty, Haddish immediately springboarded off the idea of experiencing something refreshing and unique. A breath of fresh air, perhaps? “That’s what I hope [audiences] get from the second season, like a resuscitation of fresh air, of fun, or a resuscitation of funny, and maybe they feel like they can also to solve mysteries.”

To which Woods, always on the mark, immediately shot back with: “There’s some great product placement. So maybe they’ll see some items and think, ‘Hey, I want to buy that.”

These two. Always joking around. Catch season two of The Afterparty on July 7 on Apple TV+