‘The Arrangement’s Lexa Doig: DeAnn Will Have Her ‘#TimesUp Moment’ In ‘Darker’ Season 2

‘The Arrangement’ season 2 is in full swing, and HollywoodLife talked EXCLUSIVELy with star Lexa Doig about DeAnn’s powerful storyline ahead. Will she break away from Terence or stay loyal to him?

The Arrangement season 2 premiered March 11, and the show is already diving deep into the characters we met in the first season. From just the premiere alone, this season is going to be even more intense than the first. DeAnn and Terence are still running IHM, with Terence desperate to grow the Institute to new heights. DeAnn is keeping busy with the developments regarding Kyle and Megan’s new movie, Technicolor Highway. A new love interest of DeAnn’s was introduced in the premiere, but DeAnn’s relationship with the mysterious Mason is far from new.

HollywoodLife talked EXCLUSIVELY with Lexa about what lies ahead in the episodes to come. DeAnn may be married to Terence, but she has her own agenda. The second season, which airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on E!, will further explore Terence and DeAnn’s unconventional relationship. Lexa also revealed that DeAnn will have her own “#TimesUp moment” this season. Will she finally reach her breaking point with Terence? And how much of a role will Mason play this season? Mason isn’t just a hookup. Lexa says Mason is the “love” of DeAnn’s life. Check out our full Q&A below:

Could we possibly see DeAnn branch out from Terence and IHM in the second season?
Lexa Doig: I definitely think she could branch out. She’s not particularly loyal to IHM. She’s loyal to a degree. She’s loyal as far as it serves her. When it no longer serves her, I don’t think she necessarily needs to be loyal. Not to say that she’s a complete sociopath, but let’s just her and Terence are fairly well-matched.

Are we going to explore the complexities regarding DeAnn and Terence’s relationship?
Lexa Doig: I think what we begin to see is that. Michael [Vartan] and I decided that they had been together for about 20 years, so they were young when they got together. There’s a lot of changes that happen in a relationship when you are fairly young when you get together and have been together for a very long time. There’s lot of compromises that they’ve made, and I reckon DeAnn feels she has compromised more than he has. He might feel the same way, who knows? She feels that she has compromised more than he has, and I think there are resentments. In any long-term relationship, there’s a partnership. There are a couple levels of a relationship. There’s a friendship, and in their case, a business partnership that exists. The romantic/love relationship is not really there, but I do think at one point they try and recapture it, and not in a healthy way, but in Terence and DeAnn’s kind of pathological way.

I feel like DeAnn has stood in the shadows for a long time and maybe now this is her time. She’s let Terence do his thing and I hope she now gets to step out of the shadows.
Lexa Doig: She has a #TimesUp moment, not even going to lie. The hilarious thing about that, and I’m not trying to be glib about that movement because it’s extraordinary, but it’s fascinating how we shot stuff like that, the kind of mentality of DeAnn’s where she’s done. Like she’s basically saying in her own way, “Time’s up. I’m done. I’m over this.” That was before that came about in the Hollywood realm. It’s kind of funny to me that I sit there and I look at it and I go, “Wow, it is the sort of thing that’s part of our collective unconscious, so to speak.” A lot of women have been feeling this for a very, very long time, and it’s a long time coming.

In the premiere, fans were introduced to Mason. What can you tease about where that’s going to go?
Lexa Doig: Mason is the love of her life. Mason is the college relationship — that mad, passionate, crazy love affair that you just can’t make work because it’s not the right time in your life. I think we’re well aware that Terence and DeAnn have an agreement in terms of extramarital dalliances, for lack of a better word. They’re fine if they’re not emotional. But DeAnn and Mason have an agreement where they meet once a year. They have their weekend together, and then they go back to their lives. You get to see this whole other side of DeAnn, the one that is actually trusting and gentle and nice and in love and attached. Not that she doesn’t care about Terence, but it’s like caring for a pet scorpion, as opposed to being a relationship with an equal. She’s very much in love with Mason, and things come to a bit of a crossroads. It’s an awesome insight into DeAnn’s relationship.

At the end of last season, Megan vowed to take down IHM. Do you think DeAnn’s going to notice something’s up with Megan eventually?
Lexa Doig: Yeah, I definitely think she notices something’s up with Megan. It’s definitely something that DeAnn, oddly enough, would support. She does care about the Institute. She did help build it up to what it is, but it is not her baby the way it’s Terence’s baby. She is a storyteller. She wants to tell films. She’s a producer who works mainly if not solely with Kyle, where she probably would prefer to be the head of a studio. She’s Paula Wagner, but she wants to be Kathleen Kennedy. That’s where her sights are set. For DeAnn, she’s a little Machiavellian, and the ends justifies the means for one thing. But she’ll use what she needs to use to get what she wants.

Megan started to influence Kyle a bit more in the premiere, especially when it came to their movie. How do you think DeAnn feels Megan’s growing influence over Kyle?
Lexa Doig: I don’t think she has a problem with it, but i think she’s more concerned that Megan does’t see the big picture. DeAnn spends a lot of time looking at the chessboard, so to speak. So she’s always trying to be 27 moves ahead, and she’s looking at Megan who is trying to do things that will get her 3 moves ahead. And so, it’s almost like a mentorship, where you’re looking at this person who you see this potential in and want to help, but you go, “Whoa, slow down. You’ve got to do it right and think about this.” You can’t just blast into something because then it blows up into something that’s our of your control. I think DeAnn’s very much somebody who is about control.

How would you say the second season feels compared to the first?
Lexa Doig: It feels like a deeper dive. It’s a bit darker in some respects, if you can even say that given how season one ended. You get to see a little bit more complexities of the characters. We were setting up their world in the first season and who they are and what they want, and now we’re throwing some obstacles at them. Jonathan Abrahams and the writers have their agendas and the characters are being thrown obstacles in their path, and we get to see how they react and how they make their choices accordingly.

Kyle is a huge part of DeAnn’s success. He has to succeed in order for her to succeed in the Hollywood sphere. How far is she willing to protect Kyle?
Lexa Doig: It’s funny because we do get to see that a little bit. She’s willing to go pretty far, but she also has to have Kyle’s buy-in. She can only protect him from himself so much, so when he makes choices to do something that she completely disagrees with, there’s only so much that she can do.

March is Women’s History Month. Do you have any female figures who have inspired you in your career or life? 
Lexa Doig: Yes, there are loads of women in my life who inspired me. My mom, who I don’t always get along well with, has always been an inspiration in the sense of her bravery and relationships with other women. Her relationships with my aunties. I’m half Filipino, so the term auntie doesn’t actually refer to people who are actually related to you. But all of her best friends and the people that she emigrated to North America — first to the United States and then Canada from the Philippines — she’s always had a good relationship with her female friends. It’s interesting, I was talking to my best friend about it the other day about how I’m so grateful for the fact that I had this wonderful model for what female relationships look like in terms of being supportive and being a sisterhood, as opposed to what I hear other girlfriends of mine say, “I’ve never had any good girlfriends. Women are all out to get each other.” I’m just like, damn, I’ve never had that experience. I’ve always had really awesome friends that they’re ride or die.

Actresses that you looked up to?
Lexa Doig: When I first thought about it, no, I was a kid. I was obsessed with M*A*S*H as a child. I really wanted to be Alan Alda. Like to this day, I swear to God there are times when I look at a scene and think, “What would Alan Alda do?” So I either wanted to be Alan Alda or Hawkeye Pierce. As I got older, of course, there’s Meryl Streep. And currently, I am borderline obsessed with Viola Davis. I just cannot with that woman. She is so incredibly amazing. Kerry Washington, too. So when I was young, no, and this is again going back to something’s that’s been said a lot about representation. When I was growing up, I was a mixed kid growing up in the ’70s, and it has it’s own challenges. But when I watched TV, I didn’t see a single face that looked like mine, other than Nia Peeples. I didn’t really have a template or a role model, hence Alan Alda.