Jessica Jones Season 2 Now Filming, Potential Release Date, and More

Marvel and Netflix confirmed Jessica Jones Season 2 last year, so that's great. Details are still pretty scarce, though, so that's not great, but here's what we've got.

“Marvel is thrilled to be working with Netflix for a second season of Marvel’s Jessica Jones,” said Executive Producer and Marvel’s Head of Television, Jeph Loeb in a statement when season 2 was first announced last year. “The positive response to Jessica’s story from fans all over the world has been overwhelming and we look forward to diving even deeper into these characters and this world."

Jessica Jones Season 2 Release Date

Word came out of the TCA Winter Tour in 2016 (wow, that was a long time ago) that we won't see additional seasons of Jessica Jones or Daredevil until after The Defenders which is wrapping up production as we speak, and will likely arrive at the end of this year.

But the good news is that Jessica Jones Season 2 is now in production in NYC. There are even some brand new set photos to prove it. Check them out here.

With production kicking off, maybe Jessica Jones Season 2 will end up being the traditional spring Marvel Netflix launch for 2018? After all, both seasons of Daredevil as well as Iron Fist all arrived in early spring.

Jessica Jones Season 2 New Characters

MCU Exchange have gotten their hands on some mysterious new character breakdowns as the show continues its casting process:

[DR. KIRBY] 60s, male, open ethnicity, scientist & freethinker SERIES REGULAR – ONE YEAR DEAL

(note: MCEU is speculating that this is Dr. Karl Malus, the man responsible for the creation of Nuke in the comics, and the likely head of IGH. We can believe that)

[PRESLEY] Late 30s, Male, African American, intelligent, driven, self-assured FRACTIONAL SERIES REGULAR

[OLIVER] 34-38, male, Latino, artistic, paternal, smart, scruffy and hip SERIES REGULAR

[INGRID] Early-mid 30s, 5’8 – 5’11, female, dark hair, attractive and edgy, has a history of living on the streets. Educated as a nurse, but street-wise. She is attracted to men and women…SERIES REGULAR

We do at least have one official piece of casting news, though! Janet McTeer (Tumbleweeds, Me Before You) has joined the cast in an "undisclosed" role. Now, whenever Marvel doesn't tell you who somebody is playing right out of the gate, you can assume two things:

1) It's an important character with potentially spoiler-y impact.

2) They're not ever going to tell us until the show is practically on top of us.

So with that in mind, I have my own theories on who Ms. McTeer might be playing, but revealing them here could be considered a spoiler. On the other hand, Jessica Jones herself (well, whoever plays her on Twitter at least), offered this clue, which doesn't necessarily line up with what I'm thinking:

Feel free to speculate away in the comments!

“We couldn’t possibly be more excited to work with Ms. McTeer for our second season,” said series Creator and Executive Producer, Melissa Rosenberg in a statement. "Her gravitas and authenticity are the perfect ingredients for all we’re trying to create this year. She disappears into roles, gives her characters extraordinary dimension and depth. We’re incredibly fortunate to be able to collaborate with her.”

Expect lots more casting news as production kicks off.

Jessica Jones Season 2 Directors

At the Transforming Hollywood symposium on diversity last summer, showrunner Melissa Rosenberg spoke about increasing representation behind the camera on Jessica Jones Season 2. All 13 episodes of Jessica Jones Season 2 will be directed by women, according to reports from numerous attendees.

This is pretty great news, and it will be interesting to see the names that are revealed as we get closer to production.

Jessica Jones Season 2 Story

Showrunner Melissa Rosenberg has been speaking in vague enough terms about what to expect from Jessica Jones season 2. Ms. Rosenberg told Deadline back in November about what shape things might take. 

"I think one of the things I would be able to do now, that’s harder to do in the first season, is to really expand on the ensemble...I would hope to further expand on the ensemble, and on Jessica’s world. She ends in a very different place than she started off. She’s still going to be Jessica Jones — that is not going to change. She will continue to drink and make mistakes, and accidentally drop people onto train tracks, but something has changed for her by the end of this season, and I’d just love to explore that in the second season."

"I learned from working on Dexter that you can advance the character, but you never want to cure the character," Rosenberg said in an interview with Esquire. "With Dexter, the moment he felt guilt or accepted that he was 'bad,' the show's over. He's no longer a sociopath. The equivalent for us would be if Jessica somehow recovered from the damage that had been done to her. People don't just heal, you don't go through that just to say, 'Oh, he got arrested, he's in jail, I'm OK now.'...That trauma is a huge part of who she is now."

We wrote about the shape the season might take and what stories it might explore right here.

Check out Jessica Jones Further Marvel Adventures on Amazon

Raelle Tucker (The Returned) will serve as writer and executive producer.

“We’ve had such an incredible response to our first season on which I’ve been so fortunate to have an extraordinary team all the way down the line from the fellow writers, executive producers, cast and crew,” said Jessica Jones showrunner Melissa Rosenberg (via Deadline). “I’m thrilled to have someone as talented as Raelle join our team as writer and executive producer as we delve into Jessica’s continued story.”

Jessica Jones Season 2 Villain

But trying to find another villain with the same impact as David Tennant's Kilgrave may prove difficult. The first season of the show opened with Jessica's greatest challenge, which was something that wasn't actually introduced until relatively late in her comic book run. It made sense, as her conflict with the Purple Man was by far her most emotional and interesting. But where does Jessica Jones season 2 take that?

Well, one possibility would seem to be adding multiple villains to the show instead of one big bad. When Entertainment Weekly asked Jessica Jones Season 2 showrunner Melissa Rosenberg how they top Kilgrave she responded, "Or antagonists, plural. No one is ever going to beat David Tennant as Kilgrave, so you don’t do that. The biggest mistake would be to try to repeat that. You just go, “OK, we’re not doing that, so we have this open to us.”

Something to consider is that the early Alias comics (which Jessica Jones is based on) were focused on relatively shorter cases, and the first attempt to bring Jessica Jones to the small screen (on the ABC network, which we have more details on right here) would have seen the show take a more traditional detective show/procedural approach. Perhaps the Netflix series could play with and subvert that formula a little bit this time around.

Jessica Jones Season 2 Cast

Speaking with Nerdist, Melissa Rosenberg wouldn't commit to the idea of getting Trish Walker into her Hellcat alter ego just yet. “You have to earn secondary character stories," she said. "You have to flesh them out enough so that they can eventually carry stories of their own, which is very much what season one was about.”

A version of this article originally ran in November 2015. It has been updated as new information becomes available.