All American: Homecoming Stars Talk Simone's New Enemy, Damon's Surprising Phone Call in Season 1 Finale
At the end of All American: Homecoming‘s freshman season, Simone Hicks found herself right where she was a year ago: getting verbally eviscerated by one Thea Mays.
During Monday’s season finale, Thea learned that she’d torn her rotator cuff, potentially as a result of borrowing Simone’s much heavier racket during a recent tennis tournament. The injury will sideline Thea for the rest of the season, clearing a spot for Simone on the team’s Top 6. But the devastation of that setback, paired with Thea’s recent discovery that boyfriend Damon initially liked Simone, led Thea to tell Simone — in no uncertain terms — that the two of them are now enemies. The words “conniving little bitch” were even thrown around, yet Simone kept her cool… much to her portrayer’s disappointment.
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“One day, [Simone] needs to step it up,” series star Geffri Maya laughs to TVLine in the video above. “I need Simone to fight back, ’cause I fight back!”
But although Maya concedes that a small part of her character “naturally” wants to take Thea down, Simone sees Thea more as “someone that she doesn’t really know how to approach,” especially when Simone “has always been very tough in the All American world.”
Now that Thea and Simone are apparent nemeses, though, Simone’s friendship with Damon could get awfully complicated in Season 2, Maya hints.
“The fact that she’s seeing him happy with someone that is now seemingly her arch-nemesis — not even a frenemy at this point! — you see how your decisions affect you,” she adds. “But no matter what, [Simone and Damon’s] relationship has always been grounded in friendship, and that’s the most important. We’ll see how she handles that.”
Damon, meanwhile, cracked open another painful chapter of his family history, discovering that Jesse Raymond — aka J.R.’s dad — is his biological father, as well. With Jesse now serving as the interim coach of Bringston’s baseball team (Coach Marcus is dealing with his own demons at the moment), Damon decided to explore his options by giving Leonard Shaw, Bringston’s ex-coach, a call.
When asked if Damon might really be considering playing for Shaw again at a different school, co-star Peyton Alex Smith theorizes, “I don’t know if it’s so much playing for Coach Shaw as it is not playing for his dad, who gave him up. The one thing that he was grounded in, that he could always count on, was baseball. He was certain he could do that. And now, he has to do that with the person who didn’t want him. I just don’t think his heart, as a young freshman, can handle it.”
What did you think of All American: Homecoming‘s first season finale? Watch our post mortem Q&A in full above, then grade the episode in our poll and hit the comments! (With reporting by Andy Swift)
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