The retreat is back and wilder than ever. Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers returns for a second season, with the first pair of new episodes dropping Wednesday (May 21) on the streamer. In it, an all-new batch of wellness-seeking strangers come together under Masha’s (Nicole Kidman) guidance — this time, in the wintry Zauberwald — and try to mend what’s broken in their lives.

Like the first season of the show, which adapted Liane Moriarty‘s novel of the same name, the show boasts an all-star cast whose counterparts have intriguing individual and relationship struggles to grapple with.

Before the Season 2 premiere for Nine Perfect Strangers, TV Insider caught up with the array of new all-stars to find out what fans should know about these newcomer characters.

Annie Murphy‘s character is Imogen, and she arrives on a mission to patch things up with her estranged and aloof mother Victoria, portrayed by Christine Baranski.

“I think my character is desperate and over the moon and enthusiastic and terrified all at once,” Murphy teased to TV Insider. “She wants so badly to fix herself and to fix her relationship with her mom, and I think she’s terrified of that not happening as this is kind of her last resort.”

Victoria is no stranger to the snowy locale, having come to it on many occasions before — though this is a first as part of Masha’s unique program.

Baranski teased Victoria’s mindset upon her arrival, saying, “I think I’m wanting a reconciliation with my daughter even if it means having to go to this rather peculiar wellness thing. I don’t know quite what I’m in for, but time is of the essence with my character because of her condition. So I show up, and actually, I’m the only character who’s been to Zauberwald before, going there for relaxation after one of my many marriages ended, so I go for spa treatments. But I show up looking at the spa menu, hoping that I’m just going to have a lovely time and eventually have a reconciliation with my daughter, and it gets a lot more complicated.”

It doesn’t take long for the complications between the mother and daughter duo to begin because, well, Victoria brings an unexpected plus-one in Aras Aydin‘s Matteo. Aydin, a Turkish actor, teased of his curious role, “Matteo came to the upper world with Victoria because he’s a lonely boy, I think, and at some point, she’s like a friend and even a family to me.”

They aren’t the only characters who come together. There’s also Maisie Richardson-Sellers‘ Wolfie and King Princess‘ Tina, a lesbian couple whose romantic connection has been lost to time.

Disney / Reiner Bajo

“You’re meeting Wolfie and Tina … six years into this relationship, and it’s like they’ve accumulated this baggage, they’ve accumulated resentment. So you’re meeting them at their breaking point,” King Princess teased. “I think they love each other, but they don’t really like each other anymore. And I think that’s a really interesting place to meet two people. There was love, there was intimacy and romance, and now something has gone awry, and they’ve grown apart, and it was really fun for Maisie and I to sit down and basically construct the most toxic lesbian relationship that we could think of — and we were both experts, by the way, we’ve done a lot of field research.”

Richardson-Sellers added of Wolfie’s perspective in pursuing the retreat, “She’s in a place of survival. She’s on that brink and she’s tittering on the edge, and I think it’s very much, this is her last chance. She’s put everything into Tina. She’s invested her whole life into Tina, and now Tina’s walking away from that. And this is the make or break. So she’s definitely like when someone’s drowning and they sort of trying to grasp at anything to stay afloat, that’s the mode you find her in. And she goes on the journey of unveiling and seeing herself for the first time in years. And does she like the person she sees and is this person she sees still compatible with Tina? And how is she gonna really step into her true light? ”

Disney / Reiner Bajo

Murray Bartlett, who is no stranger to quirky getaway dramedies thanks to The White Lotus, described his character as someone who’s desperate to get away from himself. “Brian is a kids’ TV show host who has deep anger issues, and they have sort of caused this sort of collapse of his career,” he teased. “You meet him when he’s pretty broken really and … it’s sort of like the final frontier, I think, for him, of trying to figure out how to make sense of his life and move forwards or just descend completely into the abyss.”

Like the others, he comes in with relationship baggage of his own — albeit a very different kind. “Brian also has a puppet that he uses in his kids’ TV show who he brings with him. It turns out the puppet is very important to him and almost like an extension of him, and they have quite a strong relationship,” he explained. “Brian is looking to be saved, really, from just falling into that abyss and doesn’t really see a way out at this point when we meet him.”

Disney / Reiner Bajo

Meanwhile, Dolly De Leon‘s Agnes is also facing a very different kind of relationship crisis than the others, as she is a former nun whose breakup was with God. “She’s looking for answers. She wants to find out why God has stopped talking to her because all her life, she’s had constant conversations with God, but then it stopped. So she left the convent because she felt that it was not a place for her to be at anymore. So she goes to Masha upon her invitation, trying to look for answers and to do everything she can to heal herself and, in the process, thinks that by helping other people, she’ll be able to heal herself.”

Other newcomers featured in Season 2 are Henry Golding‘s Peter, Mark Strong as Peter’s billionaire father David, Lena Olin as Masha’s mentor Helena, and Lucas Englander as Helena’s son Martin.

Get ready for a trippy ride indeed when all of these individuals come together under one roof for another drug-fueled experience with Masha.

Nine Perfect Strangers, Season 2 Premiere (two episodes), Wednesday, May 21, Hulu