Seth MacFarlane’s Ted event series returns for Season 2, with all eight episodes premiering this Thursday March 5th on Peacock. The iconic bear and the Bennett family are once again caught-up in hilarious ’90s-set hijinks… that are even more outrageous this time. Max Burkholder, who plays John (the younger version of Mark Wahlberg’s character in the movies), told me he was surprised at the craziness of this second season. “As we were reading the scripts for Season 2, ahead of the table reads, I was like, ‘Oh s–t, the swings we’re taking are a lot bigger this season. The production value’s way bigger. The size of the episodes is huge. It goes to a cartoonish level of stuff we didn’t even approach in Season 1.”

Giorgia Whigham plays John’s cousin Blaire, the voice of reason amidst the family’s chaos and insanity: “The level-headedness Blaire brings just kind of grounds everything a little bit but also gives perspective on how ridiculous everyone else is around her. That’s super cool. And it’s not too far off from how I would actually react to these situations.” Whigham’s dad, actor Shea Whigham, is in Best Picture Academy Award nominee F1. Giorgia will be rooting for that and Sinners on Oscar Night.

Burkholder has had a long voice acting career, from Roo on Disney Winnie the Pooh shows, to the more recent adult animated series Invincible. But he admits, “I hesitate to call myself a voice actor because you think of real incredible voice actors. I’m thinking of Troy Baker, Matt Mercer, Tara Strong… all these incredible people who really know what they’re doing. That’s not me. When they needed someone to believably sound like a little kid because I was a little kid, they brought me in for that.”

Both Burkholder and Whigham are in awe of the tech that goes into making Ted come alive. “The VFX software, programs and technology that were created specifically to make this bear ok, easier and possible to shoot, blows my mind,” Burkholder said. They film scenes with MacFarlane off to the side delivering his Ted lines, making them often think on the fly. “It started off really strange,” Whigham told me. “You would hear this booming voice from another room and you wanna turn and talk to the voice, but you’re supposed to be focused on right here, where Ted is standing. So it took a little bit of time to get used to that, but jumping into Season 2, we were all pretty seasoned.”John’s father Matty is played by Scott Grimes, who’s also amazed by the impact of the title bear. “Jackson, it never gets old on the set. We have a stuffy, a little stuffed animal we work with. Hearing Seth do the voice… and I’m like you, I’m a fan of the movie. But you kinda gotta steal yourself for a second all the time and go, ‘Wow. I’m doing a scene with the talking bear Ted.'”

Grimes also voices Steve on MacFarlane’s long-running animated series American Dad!, which just started airing new episodes again on FOX, after being on TBS for a decade. “…With voice acting you gotta exaggerate. Seth has always taught me, or taught people, that voice acting is just about energy. If you can relay that energy through that microphone into the recording process, it’s kind of a gift. It’s not easy. And that’s what Matty is on Ted as well. He’s exaggerated. He’s loud. So I think doing Steve Smith, that I’ve done for years, not only helped me because the comedy is the same — it’s broad and it’s Seth’s writing — but it helped me with Matty as well to just have that voice.”

Alanna Ubach, who plays matriarch Susan Bennett, has lent her voice to roles in Pixar’s Coco, on Disney TV shows, and in Gore Verbinski’s Oscar-winning Rango, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this week (a fact Ubach couldn’t believe). “Voice acting, to me, is so special because cartoons were my babysitters growing up,” she said, with Merrie Melodies and Wait Till Your Father Gets Home among the programs she watched every day after school. “When Family Guy came out I thought, ‘I wonder if Seth ever watched Wait Till Your Father Gets Home‘ because it reminded me so much of that. It brought these very human, wacky elements to these characters. They’re almost so exaggerated that they’re very real in many ways too. I didn’t realize that the voice [of Susan] really meant everything to Seth until I was brought back to the third and final callback, where I thought, ‘Oh wait, voice really is everything to this character’ and obviously makes a huge difference because I’m a bit of an alto. To make her up here… it takes some effort.”