The Umbrella Academy season 2: release date, trailer, cast and what we know

The Umbrella Academy season 2 release date is imminent, with the show landing on 31 July and (spoiler alert if you've not finished season 1!): we're heading to Dallas in the '60s, where the Hargreeves siblings have been scattered to time after the events of season 1's finale. They now have to reunite to face a nuclear threat, and it's down to Five to bring the Umbrella Academy back together.

Based on the comics by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, The Umbrella Academy follows the dysfunctional Hargreeves children. Scroll down for more on the story of the second season, and check out the full The Umbrella Academy season 2 trailer, which has just been released by Netflix.

Here's everything we know about The Umbrella Academy season 2, including its release date, trailer, and cast.

The Umbrella Academy season 2 release date: July 2020

The Umbrella season 2 release date is July 31, 2020, so not long to wait now. You can watch it from midnight PT in the US, or 8AM in the UK. The Umbrella Academy season 2 was confirmed by Netflix in April 2019 and shooting wrapped in November 2019. The post-production of the show has since been worked on remotely.

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The Umbrella Academy season 2 trailer: watch it here

The Umbrella Academy season 2 trailer is now here, and you can watch it above. In addition, Netflix has released the first three minutes of The Umbrella Academy season 2, which you can watch below.

The Umbrella Academy season 2 story: welcome to 1960s Dallas

The Umbrella Academy season 2 will pick up directly after the end of season 1, where Number Seven/Vanya (who, unbeknownst to her family, had superpowers all along) blasted a chunk off the Moon – inadvertently causing the destruction of Earth. The teleporting Number Five saved the Hargreeves siblings by transporting them to another time – in the process reverting them to their teenage selves. 

Where did they land? Early '60s Dallas, Texas, it's been confirmed. The plot of The Umbrella Academy season 2 will see Number Five trying to reunite the siblings, who travelled back to the '60s, to take on another world-ending threat. That threat, it turns out, is nuclear doomsday, caused by their own timeline disrupting activities. 

The only problem is, the family arrived in the past spread out across a three-year period, which means some have started new lives in the '60s. While Five tries to reunite the Umbrella Academy, a trio of Swedish assassins are coming for them. So you should expect a very different season 2, in both the setting of the show and its themes.

In June 2020, Netflix released the above new images of where the characters are season at the start of season 2. New characters will be introduced, according to EW, including a housewife called Sissy, a 'chameleon' character called Lila and a leader figure called Raymond. T

While the TV show made a dramatic change from the comic book storyline because the Hargreeves siblings didn’t save the world apocalypse, the show’s writer’s room is still using Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá’s graphic novels as a blueprint for the series. That means, there may be some clues in there – for example, we may see Number One/Luther deal with depression, in the wake of revelations about his father’s decision to send him to the Moon for four years. 

“The goal is not to diverge [from the graphic novels],” executive producer Steve Blackman told Indiewire. “Not everything translates from the graphic novel page to the screen, but there’s a legion of fans and I want to bring in a whole new legion of fans who’ve never read the graphic novel, so the goal is not to just go off in our own direction.”

And Gerard Way (arguably more famous for his other job as My Chemical Romance’s frontman) is keen that the planned eight-part graphic novel arc he’s writing with Bá should keep setting the agenda – nobody involved wants the show to overtake the source material as Game of Thrones did George RR Martin’s novels. 

“The goal for us is to stay ahead of the show,” Way said in the same interview, “and since we’re on series three [of the comics], we are now ahead of the show.”

And in case of emergency, Way and Bá have assembled an 18-page roadmap for Blackman and the rest of the writing team so they know where everything’s going.

Umbrella Academy season 2 cast: who's in the show?

Although they’ll presumably be starting out in their teenage incarnations, the grown-up versions of the Hargreeves siblings are all back in action in season 2. 

That means returns for Tom Hopper (Number One/Luther – ability: super strength), David Castañeda (Number Two/Diego – ability: controlling the trajectory of projectiles), Emmy Raver-Lampman (Number Three/Allison – ability: can make people do anything she tells them to), Robert Sheehan (Number Four/Klaus – ability: talks to the dead), Aidan Gallagher (Number Five – ability: teleporting/time travel), Justin H Min (Number Six/Ben – ability: weird tentacle things) and Ellen Page (Number Seven/Vanya – ability: initially nothing, then everything). 

This Instagram post shows five of them having an on-set family reunion:

Three newcomers to the cast have also been announced – and seeing as they’re all the right sort of age to play 30-somethings, we reckon they could be members of that exclusive club of 43 superpowered sprogs born on October 1, 1989. The official Umbrella Academy Twitter account has this to say about them:

Lila (played by Ritu Arya)

• A chameleon who can be as brilliant or as clinically insane as the situation requires.
• Unpredictable, mischievous, sarcastic.
• Twisted sense of humour.

Raymond (played by Yusuf Gatewood)

• Born leader and devoted husband.
• Has the smarts, gravitas, and confidence to never have to prove it to anyone. 
• Has the innate ability to disarm you with a look.

Sissy (played by Marin Ireland)

• Fearless, no-nonsense Texas mom.
• Married young for all the wrong reasons.
• Eager to rediscover what life and love has to offer.

And this is yet to be confirmed officially, but the timeline-hopping storyline means the apocalypse surely won’t have meant the end for time-travelling assassins Cha-Cha (Mary J Blige) and Hazel (Cameron Britton), or their boss The Handler (Kate Walsh). 

And somewhere between time travel, flashbacks and Klaus’s ability to talk to the dead, there should be numerous routes back for the deceased Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore), the siblings’ android Mom, Grace (Jordan Claire Robbins), and chimpanzee assistant Pogo (Adam Godley).

Bring on season 2

The end of the Marvel shows on Netflix might be a blessing in disguise. Marvel Studios now controls all live-action versions of its characters, and it's seemingly pushed Netflix to adapt some more unusual superhero fiction. As well as The Umbrella Academy, the streaming service also has adaptations of comics by Kick-Ass creator Mark Millar on the way (which will be a very different proposition).

Being based on a non-Marvel comic clearly didn't hurt The Umbrella Academy's popularity at all. Let's hope we see many more seasons of it. 

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