'Loot' Co-Creator Matt Hubbard With Maya Rudolph And Joel Kim Booster

“Molly at the start of Season 2 is nursing her wounds a bit, but has really taken charge of her life,” Maya Rudolph said of her Loot character at the show’s Deadline Contenders TV panel Saturday. “For her, that includes a wellness, a real growth at the Wells Foundation and really stepping into the role of being boss, which is really invigorating for her.”

After going on a worldwide bender, newly single 45-year-old Molly Wells (Rudolph), who became the world’s third-richest woman after divorcing her tech billionaire husband, decides to run the day-to-day operation of the charitable foundation she forgot that she had founded, much to its employees’ chagrin. Season 2 begins after Molly makes the mistake of sleeping with her ex John, played by Adam Scott, and decides to redouble her efforts at the Wells Foundation.

“When we were figuring out the idea, I was reading so much about billionaires and some of them had been going through divorces and that’s how we came up with the idea,” co-creator Matt Hubbard said. “Billionaires have an outsized influence on our lives. It’s almost like they’re American royalty. We look up to them, and are challenged by them, and are worried about them, so I think it’s a very fun and particularly American kind of issue and a great world to explore.”

Also joining the panel was Joel Kim Booster, who plays Molly’s personal assistant and closest friend Nicholas, whose character opens up more in the second season. “They did such a great job in Season 1 of creating this really great character that was certainly not a stretch for me, by any means, to be a mean gay guy,” Kim Booster said.

“That was the original name for the character, right? Mean Gay Guy?” joked Rudolph.

“It was really nice in Season 2 that they gave me the opportunity to peel back some of those layers to see why he might be the way that he is and why he has some of those walls up, and why he uses that snarkiness as that defense mechanism,” Kim Booster said. “It’s nice to humanize him and ground him a little bit more, because let me tell you, I get called in to be a gay assistant constantly — it’s the only role Hollywood wants to see me play — and I’m so grateful that I get to do it in a way that feels like a real three-dimensional human being and not just a caricature.”

In terms of grounding the show itself in reality, Rudolph finds the philanthropic aspect of the story to be incredibly uplifting. “There is a conversation that is always created. I love the ‘Space for Everyone’ ideas that is brought up this season,” she said. “I love the idea of doing something in your own city, taking existing buildings and creating housing for the unhoused is a wonderful conversation to have and I feel like the show is constantly doing that, and sometime we’ve seen that reflected.”