ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Why did you decide to start the series with the Vikings’ coming to America sequence?
MICHAEL GREEN: The Vikings sequence was one of the first big hills that we had to die on, production-wise, for a number of reasons. It’s gigantic. It took us several days of filming that didn’t include a single main character. It was going to require a lot of stunts and stuntmen, and we needed to build a boat. With the exception of the first shot when they’re on the water, that’s a real boat we bought, and we knew exactly how many dollars that would cost. The sequence was originally the top of episode 2, but it was very important to us to start these episodes, especially early on, with not just a tonal land grab but, well, a tonal land grab of something unexpected and strange and funny to us and, though it seems off point, is thematically necessary.
BRYAN FULLER: Originally, the opening was going to be Mrs. Fadil meeting Anubis in her Brooklyn apartment, which now opens episode 3. Michael and I were very conscious of how male the first episode was leaning, so we wanted to start with that scene, because really the only strong female presence in the first episode is Bilquis, and we wanted to have more female energy in it. But what we discovered is that the very male Viking opening spoke to the overall themes and arc of the series better than the story with Mrs. Fadil, so there was some shuffling of the Somewhere in Americas in the first two episodes as we were figuring out what the show was and what the story it needed to tell was.
Viewers might not realize that the man narrating the sequence is Mr. Ibis (Demore Barnes). What’s the significance of bringing him into this role as the writer of these tales?
GREEN: In addition to him being a strong presence in the book, it was sort of just a cheeky nod to [remembering] that this was a thing written. It all starts with a quiet writer at a table, or a train, or wherever they happen to be, so it’s a little bit of remembering the source material and that history, and how stories are someone’s telling more than they are fact. And stories of how people came to this country are personal or family legends that become as important as fact.
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