‘Everything’s Gonna Be Okay’ Star Adam Faison on Incorporating ASL into the Show’s Second Season

Everything’s Gonna Be Okay star Adam Faison on the show’s acclaimed second season, what it was like to finally explore Adam outside of his relationship, and incorporating ASL into the show.

In the second season of Freeform’s Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, we find Adam Faison’s Alex almost in a COVID purgatory. Isolated from most of the world, we spend most of the second season as Alex and Nicholas try to break down walls within their relationship. Along the way, we finally get to see glimpses into Alex’s own life.

In the standout episode “California Banana Bugs,” audiences are finally introduced to Alex’s own family as we see him for the first time out of the confines of his relationship. We meet his sister and his father as they navigate his parents newly announced divorce. Audiences also find out that both of his parents are deaf and as a result he grew up in a bilingual household speaking English and ASL. In conversation with Awards Daily, Adam Faison detailed what it was like learning American Sign Language – a journey he began well before the show so that could communicate with his own friends.

Awards Daily: Like every other show right now, the pandemic forced Everything’s Gonna Be Okay to go in an unexpected creative direction for the second season. What has that process been like for you?

Adam Faison: It’s been kind of wild! Josh [Thomas] is really good at writing to whatever is happening in real life. I know he mentioned that this season was challenging to write in terms of timing. Figuring out if people would still be interested in or be able to relate to what we were depicting months later. I think he came to a great middle ground where the pandemic is the backdrop to the story we actually wanted to tell.

AD: In the second season we finally get to see who Alex is separate from his relationship with Nicholas. What was that like for you to explore that aspect of Alex?

AF: I was so excited! I remember asking Josh in the first season about whether or not Alex had parents and what his backstory was, but it ultimately needed to wait as they tackled the machinations of Nicholas, Genevieve, and Matilda losing their dad. When the second season came around it gave us more time to explore Alex.

I loved that he also incorporated ASL into his family story. I have been learning sign language over the past few years and when Josh found out he wanted to write that into the narrative.

AD: So ASL is something you had been learning even before you knew it would be essential to Alex’s story?

AF: Yeah, I had been learning for a while! One of my close friends, Omar, is deaf. We had been constantly hanging out and it hit me that most of our mutual friends were only able to communicate with him through apps on a phone. It was a lot of voice to text back-and-forth, so I decided to take the initiative and begin learning. I first began teaching myself through foundational videos on Youtube through instructors like Bill Vicars.

Once I found out it would be a part of Alex’s story I began ramping it up and taking lessons with a guy named Andrew Moore. He has been deaf since birth and it allowed us to have more conversational ASL which was important to making the connection genuine between CJ [CJ Jones who plays Adam’s father] and I. So many times these damn shows will portray ASL at a quarter speed with people they supposedly will have known for years, so it seems a little silly. I was really excited to create this authentic relationship between a father and his son.

AD: In the second season we see the relationship between Alex and Nicholas comes to a head as their vastly different coping mechanisms put a strain on their relationship. I’m curious what it was like for you to play around with that this season?

AF: As a child of divorced parents Josh asked me to sit down with the writers and discuss our own experiences. We focused a lot on how parents eventually put their kids in the middle, whether they mean to or not.

What was interesting was trying to figure out just how intricately this affects Alex. Like he said on the show, ‘What even is divorce to a 25-year-old?’ He treats it like a pseudo-grief. We were able to find a comedic element while he figures out how he is even supposed to feel. What I found to be particularly truthful was that his emotions don’t follow a straight line – it’s more attuned to like a corn maze. There are times where they want to party and hang out and Alex is off to the side freaking out about a dead bird. It affects the relationship between Adam and Nicholas and exposes the issues between them.

AD: One of the aspects about the second season that stuck out to me was that Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, much like our own lives, rejects this idea of tokenism that we see so prevalent in media. Within the show there is never just  one person in a family meant to represent an identity and instead we see multiple depictions of people with disabilities and queer representation throughout each family. Was that something you were conscious of while making the show and did it affect the way you interpreted the material? 

AF: That’s really interesting. I am going to guess that Josh tries to not keep that consciously in his mind while writing. In the past he has told me that if he is thinking about those elements while he is writing he becomes almost too self-aware and as a by-product actually isn’t rebuking it. Instead, he tries to focus more on the situations he is writing. He wants people to connect to the realistic aspects of these stories, especially because he bases them off of our real-life experiences. That is where I think this rebuke of tokenism comes from because in our own lives we naturally have these real, multi-faceted experiences and families. I think that’s really cool.

The second season of Everything’s Gonna Be Okay airs Thursdays on Freeform and can be streamed exclusively on Hulu.