Everybody's favourite troublemaking twig returns to mischief in the second season of I Am Groot. This time, Baby Groot finds himself exploring the universe and beyond aboard the Guardians' spaceships, coming face-to-face - or nose-to-nose - with new and colourful creatures and environments.
Vin Diesel is back as the voice of Groot in five all-new shorts, while Kirsten Lepore, the writer and director of season one, returns in the same capacity for season two.
We were fortunate enough to watch the season in its entirety last month and later had the opportunity to speak with Kirsten about her return to the MCU for the long-awaited second set of (mis)adventures featuring everyone's favourite sentient tree.
The trailer for I Am Groot season 2 confirmed The Watcher will make an appearance and, while we won't spoil anything here, rest assured you can expect to see a very different side of the What If...? character when he crosses paths with Groot. So, what led to Jeffrey Wright joining this Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 spin-off?
"That was a really fun undertaking," the filmmaker says in the video below. "It was also an example of something we pitched where I was like, ‘I don’t know if they’re going to let me do this…’ They did and we were really excited about the prospect of bringing The Watcher in in a very different capacity than we’ve seen him in in What If…?"
"Working with Jeffrey Wright was amazing and I can’t say enough great things about that recording session. He’s such a cool guy. We’d actually done three lots of temporary dialogue for that episode. I did one and we had one of the editors at Marvel - who has a really great Watcher voice - do a few of them and I felt like we were reworking the scratch to pitch this episode to make sure it was working."
"We didn’t know but as soon as Jeffrey came in, it was ‘Boom, there it is. Incredible,’" Lepore continues. "He knocked it out of the park the first time around. He is The Watcher and embodies it. It was magical to witness him bringing that character to life in that capacity…and to give him a little sense of humour we hadn’t really seen."
While I Am Groot delivers a humourous take on The Watcher, the fact this series of shorts utilises photorealistic CG animation technically means the show is our first time seeing Uatu in live-action. Trust us when we say neither that nor the rest of this phenomenal second batch of episodes disappoints.
I Am Groot season 2 begins streaming on Disney+ on September 6.