The most surprising thing that actor Pico Alexander learned while filming Season 2 of Dickinson is that his co-star isn’t terrible. “Turns out, Finn Jones? Not a jerk!” Alexander jokes when he, Jones, and I hang out on a video chat. Jones laughs. “I know! Shocker.”

Jones and Alexander are new additions to Apple TV+’s Dickinson; before joining, Alexander was in Catch-22 and Jones is known for Game of Thrones and Iron Fist.

In the second season of Dickinson (which dropped January 8, the finale aired February 26) Jones stars as the new season’s antagonist Samuel Bowles, a charming self-identified “feminist” who wants to publish Emily Dickinson’s (Hailee Steinfeld) poems but doesn’t have her best interest at heart. Alexander joined the show to play Henry “Ship” Shipley, a conservative himbo whose relationship with Emily's sister Lavinia Dickinson is fun to watch, but all wrong; he thinks he wants a traditional housewife and Lavinia is unable to convince him otherwise.

Both Bowles, Emily’s publisher, and Ship, Lavinia’s fiancé, represent different romantic and career temptations for the Dickinson sisters and they’re untrustworthy in different ways. “They’re different iterations of toxic masculinity,” Alexander says, which makes Jones laugh. “Toxic masculinity” is clearly a buzzword they’ve been hitting a lot in Dickinson press.

Ship isn't purposefully toxic, though. "I think he's just more like, blundering about," says Alexander. "Kind of like a bull in a china shop, just knocking valuable things over and not really knowing that he's doing it."