In the upcoming second season of Peacock’s Twisted Metal, the mysterious Calypso invites all the killers, vigilantes and joyriders of the Divided States of America to participate in a demolition derby tournament with the promise of making the winner’s greatest wish come true.
“Everybody's a villain this season because we're in a tournament,” Twisted Metal star Anthony Mackie told IGN earlier this week.
We spoke with Mackie, his co-star Stephanie Beatriz and showrunner Michael Jonathan Smith for our latest digital cover story, which reveals exclusive first-look photos from Season 2 as well as new plot details and cast members.
We can also exclusively announce that Twisted Metal: Season 2 premieres on Peacock on July 31, 2025.
Scroll through the gallery below for 11 exclusive photos from Twisted Metal: Season 2.
Dollface: John Doe’s Vigilante Sister Unmasked
“John, at the end of Season 1, gets his wish in a way. He wants community, he wants family, and he gets this realization at the end of Season 1 that he's actually from New San Francisco,” Smith explained. Mackie added, “That's the great thing about the new season, he's pretty much on top of the world. He's gotten everything he could ask for and he's realizing what's the truth of the New San Francisco life now.”
John’s literal and emotional journey in Season 2 is intertwined with that of Dollface (played by Tiana Okoye). It was revealed at the end last season that the amnesiac John has a sister, who is first seen wearing a doll face mask and in the company of a group of female vigilantes known as the Dolls. Season 2 reveals that her name is Krista and she’s the leader of the Dolls, who fight, Robin Hood-style, for the survival of the Outsiders against the Insiders.
“What's great is that Krista has sort of been on the outside and she's had a different experience than John,” said Smith. “Krista has seen the inequality between the Insiders and Outsiders, and she doesn't like it. She has decided to fight against it and really wants to find a balance between the Insiders and Outsiders.”
Mackie said John meeting Krista “legitimizes who he is as a character and a person. Even just in real life, we always find ourselves so isolated and alone at times, not having a family connection, not having a home base, being a nomad almost. And then once he finds his sister, he has that grounding again. He has that purpose again. So it kind of takes him back to that childhood that he lost, that he couldn't recollect, or answers all those questions for him that he's always had.”
Although they’re siblings and have some similarities, Smith pointed out the key differences between John and Krista. “We like that she's just as crazy as John is. She's just as violent in some ways and we like seeing a little bit of the things that make them the same, but also she's much more willing to get into the battle. John has spent his entire life avoiding conflict in some ways. He just needs to drive, he needs to get from point A to point B. But Krista has spent her life getting into the conflict, seeing that sometimes you can't stay out of the battle and is more than happy to get in the middle of it.”
As it turns out, one of Krista’s key lieutenants is none other than John’s former girlfriend Quiet, who joined the Dolls at the end of the first season. “Quiet's nothing if not a survivor, and to survive in the world, you have to make alliances, allegiances. You need to make sure that you're safe, and that's what she does,” said Beatriz. “The audience is going to figure out who and how Dollface is connected to John and how the coincidental/not coincidental connection that she has to Quiet allows those discoveries to happen.”
Beatriz doubled down on that crypticness: “In this world, it's like, how much can you trust what anybody says from one episode to the next? I think that's a theme that you'll see throughout the season. Trust is a big thing in this world because it's not just about trusting somebody or what somebody says to you, right? It's like really trusting somebody is truly putting your life in their hands often in this world. … Just because somebody says something is true doesn't necessarily make it so.”
And everyone’s trust will be put to the literal test this season when they participate in Calypso’s Twisted Metal Tournament. “If we're all in this tournament together, nobody is my friend except my teammate,” said Beatriz.
Calypso and the Twisted Metal Tournament
Calypso is one of only three characters to have appeared in every Twisted Metal game, so there was plenty of material for showrunner Michael Jonathan Smith and actor Anthony Carrigan, who is a fan of the game, to draw from in shaping the TV show’s incarnation of him.
“My take on Calypso is he's a little bit of everything from the games. He's always three steps ahead. He's got great grand plans for the tournament,” Smith explained. “He's a showman. He really loves showing off. I think this is a version of Calypso where he's a performer. He's got a little bit of P.T. Barnum in him where he loves to have those twists. But I think there's definitely that element of he does not like being shown up and he does not like other people being the center of attention, which is great.
“I think what's also great about the way Anthony portrays him is that there's this childish glee with it too,” Smith added. “He's kind of being the audience surrogate in some ways where he's just enjoying this because he's bringing these drivers in and letting them enter the tournament. But he's the one who's watching it. He's the one who's getting to see the tournament play out and enjoying the twists and turns of it. And I think he enjoys it just as much as he enjoys coming up with what the rounds are.”
For an Outsider like Quiet, Calypso initially represents “the promise of what is possible,” as Beatriz put it: “In Season 1, Quiet is dazzled by it. She's really excited by the theatricality of Calypso and the promise of what is possible, like Calypso's real, and he's real and he's magic, and he makes shit happen. Suddenly, there's an elevator in the middle of a field and now we're in a weird hallway. She's just totally dazzled by it.”
Quiet wants to win Calypso’s tournament so Calypso will grant her wish to make life better for the Outsiders in the Divided States of America, but her feelings about the host will evolve over the season. (The tournament itself will play out over the latter half of the 12-episode season.)
“I think Quiet starts to look around and really dig deeper and dig down into what's actually happening around her, in particular Calypso and who he is and what he represents and how his machinations are structuring the world and how they're affecting people in it,” said Beatriz. “Real lives are affected by what he's starting to do in Season 2. I think her opinions about Calypso start to shift and change. I think it's really hard for her because she wants to believe in something bigger than her.
“For a little while, it looks like it might be Calypso, but I don't think she starts the season in the same place that she ends it in terms of how she feels about him. He's this creator of this amazing tournament that's essentially going to give everybody the promise of their greatest wish coming true, but how does that happen in this world and what does it take to make that happen? For players of the game, they already know, just because you want something so badly doesn't mean you're going to get it in the way that you imagined it would happen.”
Sweet Tooth’s Twisted Wish
The ice cream truck-driving, masked maniac may have terrorized Las Vegas in Season 1, but Sweet Tooth discovers in Season 2 that he’s got competition for being the baddest of the bad.
“He's realizing that there's other people out there, there's other killers, and he's a big fish in an even bigger pond. And he's kind of coming to grips with that,” according to Smith.
“His big wish is that he wants legacy. He wants to be the biggest killer. He wants to be the most famous killer in The Divided States of America, and he's going to do whatever he can to get that. And this time he's got Stu by his side, which is great. And it's been so fun watching the two of them kind of become this comedy duo.
“Will Arnett and Samoa Joe continue what they did last season. And I think you're going to see more violence from them, more comedy from them. I think fans are going to love to see (Sweet Tooth) play up against new villains. We kind of have our own little MCU moments, seeing them interact with enemies we've met from Season 1, new enemies that we meet,” said Smith.
“I think it's going to be really fun to see him unleash his violence on the tournament.”
Mr. Grimm
Mr. Grimm is one of only three characters – the others being Calypso and Needles Kane – who’s appeared in every Twisted Metal game. In the games, Grimm has been both human (a man with Grim Reaper-like skull face paint) and supernatural (an actual “living” skeleton). Given that he steals souls, is the show’s Mr. Grimm, played by Richard de Klerk, actually supernatural or just a mere mortal?
“I think we want to let the fans watch and decide for themselves,” said Smith. “I really wanted to make Grimm a special character. I wanted to really lean into a character who's a Grim Reaper, but we want to do our own version of that.
“We did this in Season 1 really successfully. And we do it even more where no bad guy is just a bad guy. They all have inner lives and inner wishes and a reason for them to exist. And I think we do that even better this season and I'm really excited for you to meet all of them and understand what makes them tick.”
Axel
Half-man, half-machine, Axel is another beloved Twisted Metal baddie making the leap to live-action in Season 2. While the actor playing the role has not yet been revealed, Axel will indeed appear in War Wheel form on the show, which was achieved using largely practical effects.
Smith said fans have been champing at the bit for Axel to join the show but his inclusion posed huge technical challenges. “How do you do a character that is literally a giant muscular man stuck between two gigantic wheels? You look at the design and you say, ‘How?’ And then after you ask why. And I think it was a challenge. Absolutely.”
When Axel moves at high speeds it’s a visual effect but Smith said he wanted the reveal of Axel to be the series’ “show-stopper moment.” He called production designer Carey Meyer “a genius” for achieving his vision for a practical Axel. This version of the character is the 1.0 version of Axel, according to Smith, so the design reflects the look of something that’s still being tinkered with by whoever created Axel in that world.
The actual rig for Axel required tires to be molded since there aren’t any existing wheels that were big enough. The entire apparatus was custom-built, weighed over a ton and required its own trailer to move it around because it’s that huge.
Raven: Meet the New Boss, (Not the) Same as the Old Boss
While Neve Campbell played Raven in Twisted Metal’s first season, Season 2 reveals that she was not THE Raven. No, the real Raven appears this season and is played by Patty Guggenheim, who viewers will remember as the scene-stealing Madisynn on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. Campbell’s Raven was but one of several “Ravens” working for Guggenheim’s real boss Raven, who Smith described as the “Howard Hughes goth Raven.”
"We always liked this idea of wanting to expand upon the Raven mythos. And we always liked the puppeteering kind of idea that we introduced in Season 1, especially towards the end,” Smith explained. “The more we talked about it, the more we had this idea of, ‘Well, what if there were multiple Ravens?’ New San Francisco is such a big city that we were attracted to this idea of there being multiples of them. How could she be in so many places at once?”
Smith said this new direction gave him and the writers the opportunity to pull more from the games “and to dive more into the Kelly backstory [Raven’s doomed girlfriend in Twisted Metal: Black] and give the fans those Easter eggs that I knew that they were looking for.”
Twisted Metal Mayhem
Smith explained that with John spending part of his storyline this season with his sister Dollface, Quiet also required a new character to share scenes with. So they created the character of Mayhem, played by Saylor Bell Curda.
“We talked a lot about Quiet and what Quiet's arc was going to be. And I really liked this idea that Quiet in the absence of her sibling [has] the opportunity to be a role model and what would that be like. And all the comedy that we could get from introducing a new character that could be a foil to Quiet.
“But also we liked the idea of there being someone who had been on the outside and what would someone from a younger generation be like in this world? So we really went down that path and that's where Mayhem kind of came from. And I really just liked the idea of this young artist who has been on the outside since birth. … What is that generation like? And as you learn deeper into the season, we kind of get into that. We call her an apo baby, like an apocalypse baby.”
While she may have been born an apo baby, Mayhem has since grown into quite the pain in the ass in her adolescence, according to Beatriz. “With any teenager, listening is a challenge for them. I think they have this really interesting big sister/little sister relationship. Quiet becomes her cool aunt, somebody that she can trust, that she's not in competition with … but that she can lean on, rely on in a way. That gets dangerous because alliances in this world can change really quickly. What you need in this world is to be able to make really difficult decisions when it comes to survival, and you're going to see that play out in this season with Quiet and Mayhem.
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but she's a little piece of shit,” added Beatriz. “She's a talker. She lies through her teeth. She's a teenager in this world, so she's grown up inside the world of Twisted Metal. She doesn't really remember anything before. She's really learned how to survive in this world, but I also think Quiet sees that she has a lot of potential, meaning that she's smart, she learns quickly, and once she is able to listen, then Quiet can really take her under her wing and teach her quite a bit.”
Twisted Metal: Season 2 debuts on Peacock on July 31st. In the meantime, read our Twisted Metal: Season 1 review and discover details on Sony’s canceled Twisted Metal game.
