Perry Mason Season 2's Big Twist Shocked The Actors Playing The Gallardo Bros
What makes "Perry Mason" work is how it serves as an intersection between a typical investigative series and a legal thriller. Since both of these genres are already successful in their own right, melding them together gives the series its own unique flavor and separates it from the competition.
However, one major change helps to set Season 2 of "Perry Mason" apart from the previous season, and that aspect is that Rafael (Fabrizio Guido) and Mateo Gallardo (Peter Mendoza) actually did pull the trigger on Brooks McCutcheon (Tommy Dewey). However, with the remaining mystery of who hired them and why, the second season still has plenty of things to iron out.
All the same, the two actors behind the Gallardo brothers were understandably blown away by the twist. "I was shocked; I was excited for the series," Guido told Cinema Blend. "I was excited to watch how the storyline would play, knowing that I knew it was going to take us into a direction that fueled more excitement for us," the actor went on. "We got something bigger to chew on, something bigger to bite on with the series."
The revelation changed how Season 2 played out in a big way
Peter Mendoza agreed with his onscreen brother about how much the revelation changes up the dynamic for Season 2 of "Perry Mason," which had both the main characters and the audience believing that the duo were innocent and were simply being railroaded as convenient scapegoats for the crime.
"It was like a big, whole jigsaw puzzle, but at the end, it was exciting," Mendoza explained. "It was shocking, it was surprising, and it was like, 'Oh, but what do we do with this now? Where do we go? How does that influence our performance going on?'"
While Perry (Matthew Rhys), Della (Juliet Rylance), and Paul Drake (Chris Chalk) are understandably miffed when they realize they're not playing with a full deck as far as the facts are concerned, this development does help to give Season 2 of "Perry Mason" a more morally murky texture to wade into as it continues to explore the mystery.
"It was very much Casablanca," Mendoza went on. "Like every episode was a new embellishing of the history of how we got here, so maybe that was why they did that, to create this truthfulness from us so that we didn't give away any specifics about how we got here."