Entertainment

This' Haunting Of Hill House' Season 1 Actor Will Officially Return For Season 2

by Dylan Kickham
Netflix

Netflix has finally revealed the very first confirmed cast member for the second season of its buzzy horror drama Haunting of Hill House, and the star of the new season will be a very familiar face for fans of the show. Although showrunner Mike Flanagan has confirmed that Season 2 will turn his Haunting series into an anthology series and get rid of the main characters from Season 1, it looks like the actors will still be involved, just in new roles. Victoria Pedretti will star in The Haunting of Hill House Season 2, but she will not be playing Nell Crain.

The news of Victoria Pedretti starring in Haunting's second season, which will be called The Haunting of Bly Manor, marks the first confirmed casting announcement about the upcoming season. It also seems to confirm the fan suspicion that Haunting may follow a similar model as fellow horror anthology series American Horror Story by recasting its core stable of actors in new roles each season. Pedretti starred in the first season of the show as Nell Crain, the Crain family's youngest child who is still plagued by haunting visions from her childhood in Hill House.

In a new video posted by Haunting's Twitter account, Victoria Pedretti confirms that she will be leading The Haunting of Bly Manor as a governess named Dani. Given that the new season will be based on the 19th century horror story The Turn of the Screw, which is focused on a governess taking an unusual new job, it sounds like Pedretti will be playing the central character in Bly Manor.

Victoria Pedretti's casting comes after fans have been speculating that the new season will recast Hill House's stars in new roles for Bly Manor. Carla Gugino, who played the Crain family matriarch Olivia Crain in Season 1, recently confirmed that she has been in talks with Mike Flanagan to possibly play a new role in Season 2, and Luke Crain actor Oliver Jackson-Cohen also hinted that he may know some details about the upcoming season.

The original 1898 The Turn of the Screw novella that Bly Manor will be based on only includes a small cast of characters, although it is safe to assume that the Netflix adaptation will flesh the story out much more. Aside from the governess, the other main roles in the short story are the two children that she is assigned to take care of and a pair of ghosts that haunt the manor after having recently been employed there. The children roles of Miles and Flora will most likely be the other big parts in the new season, and the Haunting series does have a selection of child actors since Hill House also heavily featured its main cast as children. Fans will have to wait to see if all of these parts will be filled by Hill House actors or whether there will be some new cast members alongside the returning ones.

The Haunting of Bly Manor is scheduled to be released on Netflix sometime in 2020.