Dayo Okeniyi On Playing Multiple Versions Of Leighton In ‘Dark Matter’ Season 2
Apple TV’s “Dark Matter” returned for its second season on August 28th, continuing the story of physicist Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) and the mind-bending world of parallel lives introduced in Blake Crouch’s bestselling novel, now marking its 10th anniversary. This season finds the Dessen family trying to settle into a life that finally feels safe, only for new threats to pull them back into chaos. Jason’s fixation on the Box deepens, Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) spirals into paranoia, Amanda (Alice Braga) and Ryan (Jimmi Simpson) search for a way home, and Leighton Vance, played by Dayo Okeniyi, presses forward with his own ambitious plan to build what he sees as a perfect world, with Blair (Amanda Brugel) determined to stop him. Her Agenda caught up with Dayo ahead of the new season to talk about playing a character who exists in wildly different forms across the multiverse.
In an exclusive interview with Her Agenda, Dayo explained that the show’s writers built each character’s alternate versions around a “nexus point,” the pivotal life decision that splits one version of a person from another. For Jason, that point is a single choice, so his variants stay relatively similar in appearance and style. Leighton’s nexus point is different by design: who actually raised him. Depending on the timeline, Leighton might have been shaped by a grandfather after losing his parents, by wealthy but absent parents, or by a more unconventional path shaped by self-discovery. That range gave Dayo far more room to differentiate each version, from haircut and wardrobe to taste in music, and he said the show’s creative team, including Crouch and fellow executive producers, encouraged him to push those distinctions as far as he wanted.
As for Leighton’s grand ambitions, Dayo said he didn’t have to look far for inspiration, pointing to real-world tech figures who set out to build things meant to connect people, only for those same innovations to bring consequences no one fully anticipated. He described drawing on the blind spot he sees in some of today’s most powerful entrepreneurs, people convinced of their own good intentions who don’t fully reckon with the danger their ambitions can create. That’s the lens he brought to Leighton, a character he frames not as a villain, but as someone whose good intentions come with real blind spots.
Dayo also spoke warmly about building his on-screen dynamic with Brugel’s Blair, describing an easy chemistry that echoed his own family dynamic as the youngest of five siblings, older-sibling energy that isn’t afraid to check him even when their characters’ power dynamic runs in the opposite direction.
New episodes of “Dark Matter” Season 2 stream Fridays on Apple TV through October 30th.
