If you went full Dark Web conspiracy-wall trying to figure out what was happening on the first season of HBO’s Westworld, gird your loins – filming the second one even made the cast lose it.
“Season two for [my character] Bernard is ‘what the f**k just happened?’” Jeffrey Wright told the crowd at a South by South West panel in Austin on Saturday. And his arc in S1 was also pretty much along those lines for the viewer, so consider yourself about to be thoroughly bamboozled.
“You feel this looming dense of dread when you’re walking up to the set because we don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Dolores, the oldest “host” in the titular Wild West robot fun-and-murder-park.
“Westworld is an onion; there’s always more layers that you’re peeling back. Every time you think you know everything, they throw more at you.”
Also, it might make you cry, and Tony Abbott probably doesn’t really know what all the fuss is about.
And while she didn’t share many details, Thandie Newton’s role of Maeve – the steely madam at the Mariposa saloon – sounds like it takes a real turn as the show moves into its next phase.
“I was f**king angry. I was really cross. They forced me to do s**t and I felt like a f**king child,” she said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“By the end of the season, I was really humbled. To be forced into a situation that is uncomfortable and then to come out the other side emboldened, is humbling.”
I feel like we’re going to have a lot more Don’t F**k With Thandie GIFs by the end of S2.
The show is back on April 22, with a few details confirmed, including that they’ll be delving more into the Shogun World facility we glimpsed in the finale. (This venture into Japanese history will no doubt be handled with the utmost cultural sensitivity and I’m sure there will be no horrible white dudes looking to live out their creepy geisha fantasies.)
Anyway, creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy said a bunch of cryptic things and didn’t give anything away, and then Elon Musk turned up.
Not even this IRL possibly-evil genius has quite figured out what happened in the S1 finale.
Nolan and Tesla founder Musk have been buddies for years, and this fact is definitely not terrifying when you think about it.
Just the brain that created Inception and the guy who wants to terraform Mars, hanging out having mad chats. Just the writer-director who gave us a genuinely compelling, reality-warping HBO reboot of a bizarre 70s movie about lifelike robots going haywire, and one of the richest and most forward-thinking technology moguls in the world, chilling after a normal dinner of normal people food, maybe having a whisky, shooting the s**t.
We should probably keep an eye on how the robots in Westworld‘s second season treat the humans, is all I’m saying. Just in case.