Dark Matter Season 2 wastes no time putting Daniela Dessen through the wringer. In the premiere, a Jason doppelganger breaks into her home, forcing her to shoot and kill him just to protect her family. Moments later, alone in a hotel bathroom, she has a complete breakdown while trying to do something as simple as unpacking her toiletry kit.
Jennifer Connelly, who plays Daniela, broke down what’s actually happening beneath the surface of that scene.
Jennifer Connelly Says Daniela No Longer Recognizes Her Own Life
Speaking in an interview with Trey Mangun, Connelly explained that the breakdown isn’t tied to one specific trigger, and that even Daniela herself doesn’t fully understand what’s overwhelming her in that moment. She said Daniela is simply trying to do something mundane, something she’s always been able to do without thinking, and finds herself unable to get through it.
“She becomes overwhelmed by emotion,” Connelly said. “And I think it’s kind of like a metaphor for what’s happening. She’s trying to walk the path that she’s been walking with her family and nothing is real anymore. Nothing that she nothing is the way that she had always understood it to be. And she’s not the person that she thought she was.”
Connelly connected that unraveling directly to Daniela’s identity as a mother, pointing to her backstory of having lost a child before and believing that protecting her son was the one thing she’d never compromise on.
“She’s done this horrible thing,” she added. “She’s uprooted. She’s thought she was someone who put protecting her son above anything, especially with her history of having lost a child. And now she’s torn him away from his whole world and his reality and his friends and his family and his life.”
According to Connelly, that realization extends beyond Daniela’s own sense of self. She’s also grappling with the fact that Jason, the man she thought she knew completely, turned out to be someone different than she believed, and that gap between expectation and reality is what finally catches up to her in that bathroom.
Dark Matter Season 2 is now streaming on Apple TV, with new episodes releasing weekly.
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