(The following story contains spoilers for the second season of Amazon’s “Homecoming”)
Despite Amazon leaving the door open, Julia Roberts does not show up during the second season of “Homecoming,” which debuted on Friday. However, there was one brief window where Roberts’ Heidi Bergman could have made an appearance.
But it would have been a literal background role for Roberts, jokes Kyle Patrick Alvarez, who took over as director this season from Sam Esmail.
Toward the end of the third episode, the show picks up Walter Cruz’s (Stephan James) story at the exact place it left off in the Season 1 finale, where Heidi catches up with him in a diner. His first words, “Just a half a day left,” were also the last words he said at the end of last season, before showing him walking out of the diner. There’s a scene where the diner is in the background, and Alvarez said they had a plan in case the sun was especially bright that day.
“You never know what kind of day it’s gonna be like or how much reflection there’s going to be in the windows, so we needed to put someone in the booth in Heidi’s wig just in case,” he said. They used Roberts’ longtime double. “The way this day, the time of the day was, you don’t really see out the window. I did joke that it would have been funny if we put America’s sweetheart, Julia Robert, in the booth for a background cameo, but that did not happen.”
Alvarez said there were never any serious discussions about Roberts’ return in front of the camera. “She was around and she visited the set, but there was never any talks.” Esmail previously told TheWrap he veered off the source material — the Amazon series is based on the Gimlet podcast of the same name — in order to give Bergman a proper sendoff.