Tedra Rogers Talks ‘Cruel Summer’ Season 2 [Interview]

Tedra Rogers had to make a major change to her appearance for her role as Amy on Cruel Summer. And it was one she was more than happy to make.

I recently spoke with Rogers about filming Cruel Summer Season 2, what she loved about wearing Y2K fashion, and what we can expect from the remainder of the season.

Rogers, a natural brunette, said she’d been wanting to dye her hair blonde for some time, but she was advised to keep her natural color while auditioning for roles. 

Then came Cruel Summer.

“My agent calls with an offer, and she was like, ‘They love you, but they want you to dye your hair blonde,'” Rogers recalled. “It was so much fun, and I got to fulfill a little fantasy of mine by being blonde for the show.”

Rogers eventually found out the reason they wanted her to go blonde for the role was pretty simple.  

“The answer I got was just there was a lot of brunette. A lot of us were naturally brunette, and they just wanted to shake it up. There was also the possibility of me going red on the table, but I had wanted to go blonde, so I pushed pretty hard,” Rogers said. “It was fun because that made Amy a really quintessential Y2K girly.”
 
 “And I actually thought maybe they were going to go a ‘mean girl’ direction with her, but that wasn’t what we did at all, which was way more fun.”

Rogers’ character, Amy, is one of Megan’s close friends in Cruel Summer Season 2, and we see their friendship change across the different timelines as the story progresses.

Rogers said one of the things she likes most about her character is how much fun she is.

“She’s really fun, and I think she tries really hard to find the levity and keep things light with her friends. But as she goes through some changes in her timelines, I think she really does love her friends. And she really feels protective over them and gets quite concerned with how things have changed.”
 
“I think for Amy and Megan, it’s really one of those friendships that… they’ve gone to school together their entire childhood,” Rogers continued. “They’re from a small town. They’ve known each other probably since they were three years old.”

“It’s one of those things where I think Amy really loves Megan, and in a way, really respects what Megan wants to be doing, even if Amy doesn’t get it. Because the way Megan kind of engages in life isn’t how Amy does it. And she rips her a little bit. She roasts her for not wanting to party, but she never really pushes her past her limits. She knows who Megan is and she’s just going to let Megan do her thing. So I think it’s a friendship of love, but not understanding.”

“That’s what I love about their relationship and just about the show, exploring these larger friendship groups in your teens, is everyone can see themselves in it.”

In addition to being able to go blonde for this role, Rogers was also excited to wear some iconic Y2K fashion (a lot of which is coming back into fashion now.)

“There’s some really fun fashion reference moments to pop culture at that time. In everyone’s outfits, but particularly in what Amy gets to wear. There’s one outfit that I’m dying for everyone to see, because I think they’re just going to flip,” Rogers said.

“I had this one morning on set where I was getting into costume, and I was putting on my Y2K stuff. And I suddenly realized — because I was only three in 1999, but that Y2K fashion that stretched into the early 2000s — I suddenly realized that I was, especially as Amy, being blonde, stepping into this version of these, what I called the big girls, that I really admired when I was growing up. The girls with the blonde hair and the crop tops that were showing their belly, and the cool shoes. I remember being really, really little and just thinking they were the coolest people in the world.”

The only problem with the fashion was that there were times when the actors were wearing summer clothes in freezing cold weather while filming. 

“It was so cold. We were in bikinis and the weather was just really unseasonably cold, for the first three months,” Rogers said. “So, any time that we looked really gorgeous and hot by the pool, or in our little summer outfits, a lot of time we were freezing our butts off, especially the first couple episodes.”

They were shooting in Vancouver, and being a local to the area, Rogers insisted that the weather wasn’t usually as cold as it was when they were filming those scenes.

“It was genuinely unseasonably cold,” she said. “So, I kept being like, ‘Guys, I know, I promise it’s not normally like this.'” 

As for what we can expect from the rest of the season, Rogers offered a few hints.

“For the whole show overall, I would say that probably what you think is going to happen isn’t what happens,” she said. “But also, I think that there’s some really beautiful moments. I think the direction they take the story is surprising and delightful.”

In addition to Cruel Summer, Rogers has an upcoming film as well as some of her own projects she’s working on. 

“I just accepted an offer for an indie feature film that I’m going to be shooting, that’s starring Sandra Oh,” Rogers said. “That I’m super excited for.”

“I’m also writing. And I’m actually moving into producing and directing some of my own work,” she added. “[This] summer, I am going to be going into production for my own short film.”

Cruel Summer airs Mondays at 10/9c on Freeform.

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