The Artful Dodger: Thomas Brodie-Sangster and creator James McNamara on coming back for season two

When British actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster landed back in Sydney a year ago, he was excited about the good coffee.

It had been two years since he was last near the waves at Bondi, but he remembered exactly where to go when he jumped in the hire car.

Brodie-Sangster, who is known for his roles in Love, Actually, The Queen’s Gambit and Game of Thrones, wasn’t sure he was coming back, at least not for The Artful Dodger, the rollicking historical action-adventure series that follows the imagined story of what happened to Oliver Twist’s more fun friend, the Artful Dodger.

The series was set in colonial Australia and saw Dodger become a talented surgeon at a time when the field was less prestigious medicine and more of a trade. Respectability is certainly not the name of the game, and Dodger can’t run away from his past or his cheeky nature.

The first season was well received when it was preleased in early 2024 – good fan reaction, good critical reviews, and it was the most streamed Disney Australian original series to date.

But then Brodie-Sangster heard nothing. “We were all wondering whether it would go again,” he told The Nightly. “We thought, ‘well, they’d know by now what (ratings) it’s going to do, you’d have thought they’d make a decision’.

“So, I had thought, ‘OK, well, we’ll probably not go again’, and I had kind of said goodbye to it.”

Happily, that was not the case. It took a bit longer than expected, but the order for a second season came from on high, and it was on.

For creator James McNamara, he spent that waiting time doing exactly what he did best – research. He dived into all the medical journals, books and articles of the day, immersing himself in how surgeries and medicine was practised in the 19th century.

What understanding did they have of sepsis, of bacteria, of cutting into someone to save their lives?

“All of our cases are taken from 1850s surgical reports, so I spent a lot of time in the mid-1850s Lancets,” he explained. “And I read Dickens, I read Austen. Which is my nerd version of going to the gym for training for a game.”

It was a gamble, preparing for episodes that may never be ordered, but McNamara said it was a TV writer’s lot in life. But, “I always had faith that The Artful Dodger would ride again.”

It might be two years between seasons, but in Dodger’s life, it’s only been a matter of months, finding him again after a daring escape from the hangman, and back in the world of the constant conflict between lawlessness and a government trying to bring “civility” to the new world.

There are some newcomers this season to join Brodie-Sangster’s Dodger, Maia Mitchell’s Lady Belle, the strong-willed and whip-smart governor’s daughter with a medical mind like no one else, and David Thewlis’s Fagin, the forever criminal and Dodger’s problematic mentor, always looking for an angle and the next score.

There’s Uncle Dickie (Jeremy Sims), the brother of the governor, and a new inspector (Luke Bracey), who represents a different romantic prospect for Lady Belle, and one who her domineering mother (Susie Porter) actually approves of.

The fresh faces re-invigorated the set. “Having new energy and new blood is a good thing because they’re excited to join, slightly nervous to join a family that already has in-jokes established, but it’s nice to have an injection of different energy,” Brodie-Sangster said.

“In the scenes too, you get to bounce off a different character portrayed by a different actor, and they bring a different energy to the piece, that’s a way of injecting a bit more excitement.”

There’s plenty of that to go around the fast-paced production, and Brodie-Sangster said he had to find his grounding again too, and tried to shake off anxieties that he was over-acting. “First scene with David (Thewlis), we were both a bit, ‘Gosh, was that we did, I can’t remember, was that the dynamic?’. We were a little bit nervous,” he recalled.

But with the experience of the first season behind him, he was also confident that they could do it again. “What we did worked, and we know how we did it, and we know how to repeat that and improve that,” he said.

When the first season was being sold and marketed, it relied heavily on the Oliver Twist and Charles Dickens connection, but now, it’s established as its own identity.

“The show has become its own thing,” McNamara said. “There’s a Dickensian breath through it but it’s not bound to Dickens, and Dodger and Fagin have taken on their own lives.

“I respectfully take my hat off to Dickens, but we’re not bound to him this season. We do have an exciting Dickensian villain who turns up, which sort of our one nod.

“The first series, we used Dickens as our launchpad, but now the Artful Dodger is very much its own beast.”

The Artful Dodger is streaming on Disney+