Future Man Season 2: Futterman’s Fall from Grace

Josh Hutcherson has endured much during his time on the set of Future Man season 2. First of all, his name bears a suspicious resemblance to that of the hapless hero he plays on the show, Josh Futterman, making whatever abuse the character receives seem a little bit more personal. But the second season of Hulu’s sci-fi comedy, which releases this Friday, January 11, 2019, is also particularly hard on Futterman, and Hutcherson was not shy about sharing the impending troubles about to be visited on his character.

“It’s not elegant, and it’s not graceful. And he falls very far,” the actor told us at New York Comic Con 2018 back in October. “He does some crazy shit to survive! He tries to drink his own piss; he’s going out into the desert like Lawrence of Arabia. The first season was crazy, but this season is crazier and even weirder I think. So I’m excited for people to see it and see if they stick around because of how weird we get. We’re going to challenge them for sure.”

More: Future Man Season 2 Review (Spoiler-Free)

Part of that challenge is finding a way for Futterman to claw his way back to significance in a future that’s far from grateful for the changes that were visited upon it as a result of Future Man‘s season one time travel shenanigans. Hutcherson highlighted some upcoming Futterman mistreatment. “Definitely got fully naked again with a fully prosthetic dick, so that’s just degrading,” he counted off before pausing to reflect, “or not maybe, I don’t know. But there’s moments where I’m throwing up all over myself, I’m drinking my own piss, I’m running around naked, I’m chained and muzzled. This season’s challenge was how far can we degrade Josh Futterman? Pretty far, apparently.”

There were times on the set of Future Man season 2 when Hutcherson had to remind himself that it was all for the comedy. “There’s definitely a point where it’s like, ‘Damn, I’m still wearing a muzzle,’” he admitted. “I would say seventy percent of this season I am somehow restrained, whether it’s handcuffs, ankle cuff, muzzle, tied to a chair, tied to this, strapped to that. I’m being held against my will constantly! And it’s a little tiring! But it’s also funny, so we did it.”

Futterman thought he had eliminated the biotic scourge of the future that resulted from the herpes cure in season one, and despite destroying the labs where the medical miracle was developed, things didn’t turn out so well even so. “He’s hugely disappointed. He thought that he saved the world,” said Hutcherson. “He thought it was going to be this oasis, an amazing place where everyone coexisted happily together, and he’s smacked in the face with the brutal reality that that is not the case, and in some ways he’s made things worse. So he’s very let down and distraught by it and now has developed this strong hero’s complex that he needs to overcome and put his ego out of the way. Which we do because we degrade the shit out of him.”

New adventures lie in wait for Futterman, but he won’t necessarily be with his old teammates, Tiger and Wolf, at the start of Future Man season 2. “There’s some new characters that come into the mix as well,” Hutcherson explained. “But basically the team is kind of fractured and splintered in ways, and he’s just trying to get them to listen to him and trying to get them together as a team to fight the good fight. But Wolf is busy being the super-leader of this messed up post-apocalyptic society, and Tiger’s off living as a biotic… Futterman’s losing his shit because he’s like, ‘Guys, we need to do something!’ And nobody wants to listen to him.”

Further Reading: Future Man Season 2: The Many Faces of Haley Joel Osment

But Hutcherson has hope that his character will muddle through in the end, maybe having to be taken down a peg before making progress. “He’s learning to deal with failure,” he told us. “That’s a big thing that he’s having to tackle throughout this season is how to take these things that are going wrong and try to make them right and try to take them in stride as much as possible. But I think that if anything this season, he’s gone backwards a little bit and has to rework some of his foundations as a person.”

Check out Josh’s journey when Future Man season 2 returns to Hulu on Friday, January 11, 2019.

Read more about Future Man season 2 here.

Michael Ahr is a writer, reviewer, and podcaster here at Den of Geek; you can check out his work here or follow him on Twitter.