Alexander Cubis and Audrey Hare take us inside Season 2 of the hit Passionflix series.
Love is the feeling that we all want to last forever. Love endures through the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Love transcends space and time and reason. Love can make a vampire step into a TGI Friday’s to impress a girl. (If you know, you know.)
The first season of The Black Dagger Brotherhood, based on J.R. Ward’s blockbuster book series, debuted in June 2025 on Passionflix. The streamer dedicated to romance adapted Ward’s Dark Lover, which focuses on Wrath (Robert Maaser) and Beth’s (Olivia Applegate) love story, for the screen. Now, it’s time to turn our attention to the second book in the series, Lover Eternal, and the second season of The Black Dagger Brotherhood.
With his movie star good looks (and endless swagger to boot) and enough charm to make you melt, you’d think Rhage (played to perfection by Alexander Cubis) has it all. But underneath that chiseled exterior, the vampire warrior is hiding his true self and keeping his emotions at bay to protect the people he cares about.
When a certain someone walks into his life, Rhage finds himself yearning for the one thing he’s denied himself — and one person he just can’t resist. (Warning: Spoilers for The Black Dagger Brotherhood Season 2 premiere ahead.)
An Encounter to Remember
The first episode of The Black Dagger Brotherhood Season 2, which premiered on October 29, brings Mary Luce into the fold. A character Lover Eternal readers know well, Audrey Hare effortlessly captures Mary’s radiance and resilience on the screen.
Mary and Rhage don’t cross paths until the end of the first episode, when Mary accompanies Bella (Mariah Davis) and John Matthew (Bobby Hogan) to the Brotherhood’s training facility. When Mary steps into the hallway, she sees Rhage for the first time and is taken aback by his beauty. Rhage, recovering from his latest transformation into The Beast, immediately senses Mary’s presence.
Still temporarily blind, he backs Mary up against the wall, and everything changes. Rhage and Mary, in this unpredictable tango of touch and breath, attempt to make sense of the inexplicable passion simmering between them. “J.R. writes with such detail about this moment specifically,” Hare tells Swooon. “We had our books on set the entire time, always referring back to it. So I think we just approached it directly from J.R.’s book, and then obviously the script as well, which was pretty, if not identical, to the book and that was our driving force.”
Rhage and Mary’s hallway moment is an essential scene from Lover Eternal, and Cubis says trust was the key to bringing that scene to life. “A scene like that could run the risk of just not playing at all and not being believable when you’re watching it, or just not working,” Cubis says, before adding, “And so Tosca [Musk], as a director, we needed to have trust in her. She needed to have trust in us. We needed to have trust in the details of the world that J.R. built. And people love the scene for a reason. I knew that, OK, this is going to be one of the most interesting scenes that I’m going to play as an actor, but so long as I hit the details, kind of like a piece of music, I trusted that it would play, and Tosca on the day would tell me if it’s not working.”
Matt Doyle
Musk, Passionflix’s CEO who also directs The Black Dagger Brotherhood, knew Rhage and Mary’s first scene together had to be portrayed in the TV series just right. “It was very interesting because it could definitely go wrong, right?” she admits. “We’re a platform for women, so we want to make sure that it’s not seen as violent or predatory. It was very important to me that she touch him.”
She commends her leads for making this pivotal moment just as thrilling to watch as it was to read. “Her performance was phenomenal. His performance was so sexy, and he really portrayed this character [where] her voice just made him relax and kind of get in. He was just so excited about it.”
Instant Connection
On the surface, Rhage and Mary couldn’t be more different. He’s an immortal vampire warrior; she’s a cancer survivor working for a suicide prevention hotline. She’s well aware of her own mortality and channels all of her focus into trying to help others. She avoids risk, while he lives a life surrounded by it.
Passionflix
Hare acknowledges that Mary has this “natural inclination to help wounded, damaged people, and I think she senses this wound in Rhage immediately” when they first meet. “She has this sixth sense of it, and I think that’s ultimately what draws her. Also attraction, but in addition to that, just this sense that he needs healing, and she’s curious,” she adds.
Cubis recognizes that Rhage and Mary both have a “really good intuition about other people in the world. Obviously, Mary’s an empath, and Rhage has been alive for hundreds of years, so he’s developed strong instincts being able to read people. But I think anyone, any people that have inner wounds or wounds that they’re dealing with, see that in other people, and they immediately empathize with it. So there’s that connection, and then obviously the circumstances are heated, and these are two characters that are just also attracted to each other as well. So there’s all of the elements kind of there from the get-go.”
Rhage and Mary’s story is only just beginning, and Season 2 will chronicle all the ups and downs thrown their way. One of their biggest challenges? Rhage’s curse, courtesy of the Scribe Virgin. Whenever Rhage loses control, he turns into a dangerous dragon dubbed The Beast.
Cubis notes that Rhage’s journey of self-acceptance will be a “driving force” for his character in the second season. “I think for a lot of the reasons why he, dare I say, sabotages or risks sabotaging the relationship at certain points, too, because he doesn’t know how to deal with it,” he tells Swooon. “And also, it affects his friendships with the brothers, too. He can’t be his true self, so he can’t be his true self with the woman that he loves, and he can’t really feel like he can be his true self with his brothers either. So figuring that out and the pull that he has towards Mary forces him. He has to. Otherwise, there’s no point for him to go on.”
The Art in Staying Faithful
Adaptations are all the rage (get it?) these days, and it’s not uncommon to see certain scenes reworked or taken out entirely in the book-to-screen process. The Black Dagger Brotherhood is one of those rare shows that is dedicated to the source material. Many scenes, like Rhage and Mary’s first meeting, are almost exactly the same as they’re described on the page.
“I mean, high point of my literary career is that I actually put antidisestablishmentarianism in a book, and now it’s on the screen,” Ward quips.
Matt Doyle
For Musk, this isn’t an anomaly — it’s the Passionflix way.
“That was the whole purpose of creating Passionflix because we’re big lovers of the romance, all romance novels, and so we wanted to take these books and adapt them exactly as the author and the fan wanted to see them happen,” she explains. “Because we are fans, and it actually annoys me when they change things in adaptations. I don’t understand. As a filmmaker, I can understand maybe you had to say this line at a different location, sure, but I don’t understand why the line is out.”
The show’s #1 fan? The Warden herself. Ward is eternally grateful for Passionflix’s faithfulness to her books and the universe she created. She calls Musk the “perfect partner” in the adaptation process “because she really cares.” Writing more than two dozen books has been a “labor of love” for Ward, and she knows the show is one for Musk and Passionflix as everyone works together to “do it right and to do it justice for what the readers and the fandom really expect and want to see.”
After Episode 1, Rhage and Mary’s romance is only just beginning. Their path to happily ever after won’t be easy one, but every love story requires a leap of faith.
The road to true love can lead you anywhere… even TGI Fridays.