All fans of Ginny & Georgia were eager to find out how MANG, the friend group at the center of the Netflix show, would come back together after their fallout in Season 1. Warning: Spoilers for Ginny & Georgia Season 2 follow. Season 2, which premiered on Jan. 5, saw Max and Norah on one side of the divide and Ginny and Abby on the other. And while Ginny and Max certainly have the bigger personalities (and grudges) of the four, Chelsea Clark, who plays Norah, found herself stuck in the middle as Norah tried to show loyalty to Max while clearly missing her other friends.
“I definitely feel like I was frustrated with Norah at times,” Clark admits in an exclusive interview with Her Campus. “I’ve been Norah and I’ve also been Ginny and I’ve also been Max, and when you know what it feels like, you’re kind of like, ‘No! Stop this! You don’t need to put your feelings aside for other people.’” Despite this, she also hopes viewers understand that everyone grows at a different pace: “You have to follow the arc of the season,” she says, adding that she learned to “put her own opinions aside” when it came time to play Norah.
Thankfully, that on-screen conflict didn’t extend to the show’s set. “The beginning of us coming back [for Season 2] was all of the emotions at once,” Clark says. Season 1 premiered in early 2021, aka the midst of the pandemic, preventing the cast from having a true premiere party and being able to get together in person. “A lot of us talking about the show together was all done online. So the first few episodes that we were filming [for Season 2] was a lot of everybody just being like, ‘Hey, how has the past two years been for you?’”
The cast also had to deal with the pressure of fan expectations after Season 1, but that was a motivating factor for Clark. “We obviously worked very hard on the show and we want everybody to like it and care about it the way that we do. So it just feels that much more intense. As the season went on, we got back into the flow. Like, we’re here to just do our jobs and have a great time and create the stories that we feel so passionately about.” Clearly they did their jobs well — the show cracked the top spot of Netflix’s TV charts upon Season 2’s premiere.
One of Clark’s closest friendships was with Sara Waisglass, aka Max. Clark and Waisglass first appeared together in Degrassi: Next Class, making Ginny & Georgia their second project together. In a standout scene from the season, the two perform a TikTok dance to Justin Bieber’s “Peaches,” a process that Clark reveals was not as seamless as it looked on screen. “We had a different dance initially, and then we both kind of were like, ‘Is this a little too hard? I think we need to dumb this down a little bit,’” she laughs. “We switched up the dance and then I think we got the re-edited version the night before, [or] maybe two nights before … It was also in the first episode, and I feel like it was such a great icebreaker for the season.”
Clark has nothing but kind things to say about working with Waisglass, who she’s known since they were 17. “I remember when we did our chemistry read, we both were so excited that it was the two of us because that was one less relationship that we had to grow from the very beginning,” she says. “Everything is so much more comfortable because you already know this person, you’ve already worked with this person. There’s just a little bit of camaraderie [from] the fact that you’ve kind of come up the same way.”
Although there’s no official word from Netflix on a Season 3 of Ginny & Georgia yet, Clark is stoked for the possibility. She hopes to see more of Norah in the future, especially in regard to her long-term relationship with Jordan, played by co-star Colton Gobbo. “I love that they’re so stable and so healthy because I love that for the new generation,” she says. (Norah and Jordan are the only long-term established couple among Ginny and her high school friends.) “I wish I was 16 watching an actual healthy relationship on TV versus all of the drama all of the time.”
Part of the feel-good nature of their relationship undoubtedly comes from her ability to work so well with Gobbo, which Clark is grateful for. “I don’t think we really had to workshop anything because he just makes the space so safe when you do scenes with him — and when you are in a relationship with somebody on a show, you have another added layer of intimacy,” she says.
She adds of potential future plotlines, “I want to see [Norah and Jordan] get into a real fight,” referencing how Norah complained to her friends about her “petty frustrations” with Jordan, like his plans for their anniversary, in Season 2. “If they’ve been together for so long, there’s a reason why. How do they work through their problems? What kind of problems do they have?”
But Norah and Jordan aren’t the only characters Clark is curious to see in Season 3. “I’d probably want a little bit more Padma,” she shares. “I really wanna know why Padma and Marcus dated. In the first season she’s like, ‘Oh, he’s not that bad,’ even though her friend’s like, ‘No, he very much is.’ So I wanna know what’s going on over there to make her have wanted to be in that relationship to begin with.”