Interview: Director Pete Segal Talks My Spy The Eternal City

ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to My Spy The Eternal City director Pete Segal about the action-comedy sequel. Segal discussed his approach to the sequel, its villain, and more. My Spy The Eternal City is out today on Prime Video.

“When Sophie’s (Coleman) high school choir is selected for an Italian tour culminating in a performance for the Pope in Vatican City, JJ (Bautista) sees this as an opportunity to bond with his new stepdaughter, so he volunteers to help chaperone the group through the Venetian canals, across Florence’s renowned bridges and into Rome’s most historic sites. Instead, he finds that he and Sophie have become unwitting pawns in a terrorist plot that could end the world as we know it,” says the synopsis.

Tyler Treese: You’ve done sequels to other series before, but this is the first time that you’ve gone back to one of your original films and did a sequel. How did that kind of change your approach, if any?

Pete Segal: Well, the story for this movie was very personal to me because I’ve been with our high school choir as a chaperone. So my wife and I have experienced at least three different trips, two to Italy with two different children of ours and one to Spain. I just knew that the stories were so rich and interesting and funny that I wanted to tell that story and handing it to someone else felt strange.

Tyler Treese: The first film had a romance subplot. This time around, there’s a lot more action, and we get to see more active espionage going on. How was it kinda leaning into that aspect for the sequel?

Well, the romance in this story was focused more on Sophie rather than Dave. We thought that was fun and a little fresher than going back to what we had already done. Because she’s growing up and as a 14-year-old, what you want in terms of your freedom and the annoying parent hovering over you. You’re gonna have issues with that. So we wanted to lean into that and putting that against the backdrop of more action, bigger set pieces was a lot of fun.

I wanted to ask about Chloe, because obviously she’s grown both in size, but also as a performer in these two films. How was it working with her and letting her in on the action? She has a lot more to do this time around.

Chloe trained for about eight months, I think, doing martial arts for this. Before the script was even written, I told her what the story was going to be around, and I told her that there would be definitely a lot more action this time around for her than there was in the first film. She couldn’t wait to get going. So, they’re gonna be releasing some behind-the-scenes footage of all the training that she did pretty soon. It was really just remarkable. She absolutely did not want the stunt girl to come in and do anything for her that she couldn’t do herself.

I also wanted to ask about Flula Borg, who plays the villain. In a film that has a lot of laughs, he’s a bit more serious. He’s obviously got the shape of an intimidating guy. So what made you think he was right for the villain here?

Well, I wasn’t as familiar with Flula’s Comedy when we hired him. He came in, and he did a terrific read as a bad guy. Because of the German accent, he was very intimidating, and then, slowly but surely, I started learning and looking him up on YouTube and seeing the comedic stuff that he was doing. I was shocked, and I thought we have a couple of funny moments in there, but he was definitely stepping into the shoes of someone who was a much more serious and dark character this time.

Thanks to Pete Segal for talking about My Spy The Eternal City.