With production on the second season of Westworld set to begin next month, showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have been chatting to Variety’s Remote Controlled Podcast about what we can expect when the acclaimed drama returns to HBO next year.
“I think the sacrifice [Ford] makes at the end of the first season is very real,” said Nolan. “I think there will be an opportunity to explore a little bit more of the backstory of how this park came to be, a little more of that story. We’ll see the character’s presence will be felt in that sense in terms of filling in a few more of the gaps about the early history of this place… It’s an ambitious season. We always knew that we wanted the stakes and the scope to increase dramatically and that means the scale of production increases as well. We have an amazingly talented group of writers, directors, and crew coming back and gearing up for what I think and what I hope will prove to be a season twice as ambitious as the first one.”
“For us, even though we’re creating it as we go along, we feel like we owe it to the fans to be bold and also to play this game with them where we’re like, ‘Do you want to figure it out? Do you want to play with us here?” added Joy. “Hopefully now, because of the first season, the people who want to have this purist interpretation of the series, they’ll just develop their own theories in a vacuum – and maybe don’t log on to Reddit.”
The second season of Westworld will hit HBO in 2018.
Originally published June 27, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
