Breaking Bad star Aaron Paul is headed to Westworld. Paul has joined the HBO sci-fi drama for season 3, EW has confirmed. The move marks the Emmy winner’s first cable TV series regular role since his work on the AMC drug drama. There are no details yet on Paul’s character.
The move comes as another leading man on Westworld, James Marsden, got snatched up by Netflix earlier this week to co-star in its dark comedy series Dead To Me — potentially signaling the end of Marsden’s involvement in the HBO drama.
Since Breaking Bad wrapped in 2013, Paul has starred in Hulu’s low-profile drama The Path and shot Apple’s upcoming series Are You Sleeping.
Westworld season 3 has no premiere date yet, though a 2020 return seems increasingly likely.
"No Bra, No Panties": How Thirteen Defined A Generation Of Women
Catherine Hardwicke was paid $3 on Thirteen — $2 for the screenplay, which she co-wrote with actress Nikki Reed (then 13), and $1 for directing. Fifteen years later, that film stands out as a still-potent cultural milestone for women who grew up in the early aughts — a searing snapshot of the twisted, painful turmoil of being a teenage girl, without the redeeming after school special epilogue. Thirteen spoke to us, not at us.
“I was a first time director,” Hardwicke said during a Refinery29 roundtable for the landmark movie's anniversary— the first time Hardwicke, Reed, and Evan Rachel Wood have been together since its release. “All the characters are women, and it was going to be rated R and about a teenager. That does not check the boxes for any studio.”
So, in her pursuit to get the film made, Hardwicke worked for nothing and poured whatever money she could into production. The filmmaker, who would go on to direct the first installment in the massive Twilight franchise, used her own furniture as props. Her car makes an appearance, as do some of her clothes. She and the cast, including leads Wood and Reed, slept in the rented house in Los Angeles where they filmed, often in the same bed. (Since then, the film has turned a profit — Hardwicke says she received a check for $18,000 two months ago.)
All of this — the paltry $1.5 million budget, the whirlwind one month summer shooting schedule — contributes to the raw, dizzying atmosphere of Thirteen, a dark and gritty take on the experience of being a teenage girl at a time when the only cinematic alternatives were Freaky Friday and The Lizzie McGuire Movie. Harmony Korine’s Kids — perhaps the closest example in terms of impact and subject matter — had come out nearly a decade before.
I vaguely remember the circumstances under which I saw Thirteen. It was likely a hot, humid early September day in Montreal — the kind that would make my best friend and I seek refuge in one of the city’s downtown movie theaters. I was 13; my best friend was days away from her own 13th birthday.
What I vividly recall are the feelings the film elicited. I remember being terrified, a fear I couldn’t exactly name, but which gnawed at my innards as I watched Tracy Freeland (Wood) morph from a prepubescent innocent into a sexualized harridan who hides her tongue and belly button piercings from her mother. Would I be like that? Should I be? I remember feeling seen, recognizing how intimate a relationship between two teenage girls can be. I remember squirming at the scenes showing interactions with boys, things I was starting to think about but couldn’t imagine myself actually going through.
Of course, none of these anxieties were voiced as the lights came up, and my best friend and I wandered back out into the haze of the afternoon. But Thirteen had made its mark, as it has on countless women of my generation.
I wouldn’t learn until years later that the film was helmed by women. The script emerged out of a collaboration between Hardwicke and Reed, who had a personal connection: Hardwicke had been in a long-term relationship with Reed’s father and thought of her as a surrogate daughter. They kept in touch after the breakup, and Hardwicke started noticing that something wasn’t right with Reed. Much like Tracy, she was acting out, rising rapidly through the ranks of popularity at her West L.A. school. And then her friends got busted for selling crystal meth.
In her concern for Reed, Hardwicke invited the teen to her Venice Beach home. It was there that over a six-day period in January 2002, the pair wrote the script that would become Thirteen. In the aftermath, they made a pact: If Hardwicke could get the film into production, she would direct it, and Reed would star in it.
Still, the road ahead was rocky. An R-rated movie co-written by a teenager with female leads wasn’t exactly an easy sell. Securing funds wasn’t easy for Hardwicke, who was then working as a production designer in Hollywood, and had no prior directing experience; Reed, meanwhile, had never acted onscreen, and the screenplay was her first. It wasn’t until Holly Hunter, who would go on to be nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Tracy’s mother, signed on that the project finally got off the ground. After an acclaimed premiere at Sundance, where Hardwicke won the top directing award, Fox Searchlight Pictures acquired the film for distribution. Thirteen was released in five U.S. theaters on August 20, 2003, and grossed $116,260 opening weekend. But the salacious subject matter resulted in word-of-mouth and heightened press coverage, especially for the teen leads. By its third week of release, Thirteen’s gross had increased by 622%, as did the film’s reach, as it went on to screen in 73 theaters, and then up to 243, for a total domestic gross of $4.6 million.
But the value of seeing oneself represented on screen is something that’s harder to quantify.
“It takes women to tell female stories,” Reed says during the interview. This is something we’ve heard many times as Hollywood grapples with the way the industry historically treated women, as well as the systemic inequality that has resulted in a still-egregious gender gap.
Thirteen was an extreme portrayal of the alienation of an especially troubled teenage girl. But that hunger for an outlet for those complicated emotions is universal. “I had a need in me, like Tracy, to just explode,” Wood said. “And acting was something I did so that I could do that. I felt like I couldn't do it anywhere else.
”If it’s been a while, here’s a quick recap: Tracy Freeland (Wood) is a good girl. She gets straight As, loves golden retrievers, and wears her fair blonde hair in cute dual buns. But that doesn’t mean everything’s rosy. Her poetry is an intense, poignant exploration of early teenagehood. Her single mother Melanie is a recovering alcoholic who runs a beauty salon out of her kitchen, and though she’s an attentive parent, she’s overwhelmed. And Tracy’s father (D.W. Moffett), constantly behind on child support, is too focused on his new family and new job to care very much. Tracy copes by locking herself in the bathroom and resorting to self-harm, an act that was shocking to many at the time. But not to Wood.
“I hadn't really done drugs,” she said. “I was a lot of talk, sex-wise, but wasn't really doing much. But the emotions, and that feeling of frustration and being lost and angry, and the dynamics with the family and the cutting — those were things where I was like, ‘Oh. I know what this is. Like, I understand this really well.”
“That's one of the reasons why I wanted to do it too,” the actress, who recently testified before Congress about a sexual assault that led her self-harm and two suicide attempts, explained. “Because I was like, I didn't know cutting was a thing until I read the script. And that's when I was like, ‘Other people do this?’
”So, when classmate Evie Zamora (Nikki Reed) comes along with her jeweled cross necklace, long glossy hair, and jeans so low you can see her thong peeking out, Tracy is already primed for some acting out. It would be easy to paint what comes next as black and white — and in fact, many of the film’s critics did so at the time. Evie and Tracy strike up a friendship, which leads Tracy down a bleak path of drugs, questionably consensual sexual encounters, illicit piercings, and shoplifting. But the truth is more complicated. In her own way, Evie is as vulnerable as Tracy. She lives with a woman named Brooke, sometimes referred to as her guardian, other times her cousin, whose main occupation seems to be recovering from Botox injections and getting drunk. She doesn’t care what Evie does with her time, as long as no ones calls the cops. With Evie by her side, Tracy upgrades to It Girl status at school. But that comes at the expense of her grades, her relationship with her mother, and even her own mental health.
The acting is fantastic. Seasoned child actress Wood, who would be nominated for a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award, handles Tracy’s descent into hell with fiery zeal, concealed under angelic looks. When, towards the end, she’s wandering Hollywood Boulevard in a crop top and smeared black lipstick, drunk, she looks like a nightmare version of herself, her inner turmoil having taken over. It’s a duality that would come into play later in her career, as Dolores, the mild host-turned-avenger on HBO’s Westworld. Reed exudes an uncomfortable degree of sexuality for such a young woman, but there’s also a sadness to her, a need to be loved. And as Melanie, a mother who loves her daughter fiercely, but is blind to the scope of what’s going on behind her closed bedroom door, Hunter quivers with anger, anxiety and concern.
Watching the film for the first time as an adult, I was amazed at how avant-garde it feels.
The central relationships aren’t romantic in nature. Instead, the film focuses on the dynamics between female friends and mothers and daughters. That fraught connection between Tracy and Melanie is one that we’re only just starting to see again, in films like Lady Bird, and, veering sharply into supernatural horror, Hereditary.
Evie and Tracy’s friendship is complex and intense, vacillating between almost sensual devotion and cruel rivalry, especially where Melanie’s affections are concerned. That need to be utterly consumed by one’s best friend while grappling with latent jealousy is so specific to young women of that age, and a dynamic that’s rarely portrayed, even today.
It’s so true to life that while filming, Wood and Reed developed a rapport that mirrored the one they were portraying on screen. “There were moments that I was completely in love with you,” Wood, who came out as bisexual in 2011, told Reed.“
We had this kind of innocence about our relationship that was so personal to us,” Reed responded. “It was ours, and it was so real [...] And then, because a lot of that was in the movie, when it became something that the press could talk about, suddenly it was like our actual relationship, in a sense, was put out there for people to talk about.”
As often happens in Hollywood, especially where young girls are concerned, the stars were held up for comparison by the press. Who was cooler? Who was hotter? Who would have the best career? Things actually got so acute that, like Tracy and Evie, the two drifted apart, not speaking again until nearly a decade later.
“We had to talk about it when we were 25,” Reed said. “I actually went to [Hardwicke’s] house, and I said, ‘You know, I haven't talked to Evan in so long, and I really miss her.’ You gave me her number, and I said, ‘Do you think she would even want me to call her?’ You were like, "Yeah. You guys are in such a similar space.’ We had both gotten married. I called [Wood], and it was so cool. [She was] like, ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’"
Still, Thirteen is best remembered for its shocking scenes — and there are many, including the opening shot, which shows Evie and Tracy sitting on a bed, huffing paint and punching each other in the face, laughing. A provocative confrontation later in the film shows Tracy bragging to her mother that's she's not wearing a bra or panties.
In one memorable moment, Evie and Nikki seduce an older neighbor, played by then-27-year-old Kip Pardue, who reportedly wasn’t aware that the actresses were 14 until he showed up to shoot. “‘He was in shock,” Hardwicke said.” I was trying to talk him down off the ledge, ‘Look, we're going to be safe. I'm going to be there, the teacher's going to be there. It's all gonna be cool.’"
Ground rules were established: A studio teacher was present at all times, sitting behind the couch the three were kissing on. “Couldn't touch the nipples,” Wood recalled. “Couldn’t touch the top of Kip’s pants.”
All the same, the final film was extremely controversial, so much so that, Hardwicke said, juvenile court judges and directors of rehab centers, accompanied her at Q&As after early screenings so parents could voice their concerns.
“Three mothers stand up: ‘My daughter would never do that,’ she recalled. “And then the judge would say, ‘Excuse me, this movie is mild. Not one person got pregnant. No one got in a car crash, no one [died by] suicide. Nobody died. I see much more elevated cases in this every single day.’”
“I found myself in a weird position where I was being asked to be sort of the spokesperson for teen angst,” Reed said. (A clip from her 2003 appearance on Ellen shows her on the defensive, explaining that she’s a straight-A student: “I just got my report card.)
Both Reed and Wood are parents themselves now. Reed and husband Ian Somerhalder have a one-year-old daughter, Bodhi Soleil. Wood’s son Jack, from her previous marriage to actor Jamie Bell, is five. “I'd show it to my son,” she said of Thirteen. “ I think boys need to be watching more female-centric films anyways, so they have a better understanding about women, and opposite sex.”
Still, they now feel they have a deeper understanding of the visceral reaction adults, particularly parents, had to the film at the time. “I see it all differently,” Reed said. “I’m totally terrified, and I’m also really grateful for it. I feel like I have a really good understanding of some of the things that are going on.“
The movie helped open the door for Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why, which graphically depicts scenes of sexual assault, self-harm, and suicide, and even to a certain extent Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham’s film about the inner life of a 14-year-old girl who turns to the internet to compensate for the feelings of inadequacy she’s facing in the real world.
The lack of social media does date the film, as does its inability to really grapple with race and privilege. As a white middle-class young woman, Tracy is afforded the benefit of the doubt, not to mention a second chance. If she’d been a woman of color, she might never have recovered from her year-long bender. In fact, the only people of color in the film are the guys that Tracy and Evie alternately hook up with, and buy drugs from, a setup that is particularly iffy in hindsight.
Overall, however, Thirteen holds up in a way that never would have seemed possible to Hardwicke or Reed at the time they wrote the script. The impact it has had over the last 15 years far exceeds its original reach. Hardwicke’s $3 payday went a long, long way.
“Literally the other day, a woman came up to me, she's like 28 or 30, working at a cool company, Hardwicke recalled. “She goes: ‘You know what, I saw Thirteen,’ and it scared her straight. She never drank or smoked in her life, or did any drugs.”
“I don’t know if there will ever be anything quite like it,” Reed said. “It was kind of just magic.”
If you or someone you know is considering self-harm, please get help. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
Evan Rachel Wood Feels Like a 'Whole Person' When Singing: 'It's Really Where My Soul Is'
Evan Rachel Wood is a woman of many talents.
Whether she’s portraying a character on the big screen or showing off her powerful vocals on stage while covering songs from the large “rolodex” in her mind, the Westworld actress says she “can’t help but not feel the music and turn it into a story.”
“I think I consume much more music than I do film because it’s a language that makes more sense to me — a well-rounded language that’s much more subtle and intricate than English to me,” she tells PEOPLE about combining her skills. “I feel like I’m fully speaking as a whole person when I’m singing.”
“Sometimes you don’t want to become someone else and you’d rather be a hyped up version of yourself, and I think that’s why I think music is really good for me and why I love doing it,” she adds. “It’s really where my soul is.”
In between projects, the Golden Globe-nominated actress, 31, has found time to live out her passion and hit the road with guitarist Zane Carney, who has worked with a star-studded list of performers including John Mayer, Avril Lavigne and U2 — for the their EVAN + ZANE tour, kicking off Tuesday night in New York City.
“Zane and I have known each other for nine years. I was in his band Carney’s music video, and ever since then we’ve been friends, especially because our musical taste is very similar and very eclectic,” she says about how they vibe together. “I feel like I’ve really been able to expand musically with Zane because you just know you’re in such good hands and he’s such an amazing guitar player it’s going to carry you through whatever you’re doing.”
She adds about how their interests have led them to create a unique string of shows: “I’ve always really been into an older sound, and with his jazz background and incredible talent on the guitar we’re able to cover so many different genres.”
And with a slew of music genres comes a slew of themes. From Psychedelia to Meow Wolf and Halloween to Jealousy, the audience is in for a new surprise with each and every show.
“What I love about it is that the audience never sees the same show twice, and him and I just get to have fun playing all of our favorite songs,” she says. “Creating the playlist is probably the most fun.”
“We like to bring a theatrical element to everything, and each time we play these characters that reflect the theme we’ve picked, so we’re definitely going to be in a really trippy place during those shows. I think the stage elements will reflect that,” she continues.
EVAN + ZANE kicks off Oct. 23 in New York City and travels through 14 cities before concluding in Raleigh, N.C. on Nov. 20. Tickets for the shows are on sale now.
Evan Rachel Wood endures hunger strike in protest of President Trump's border immigration policy
'Doing nothing' wasn't an option for Evan Rachel Wood.
The Westworld actress spent the weekend at the border between Texas and Mexico, helping families who have been separated as a result of President Donald Trump's 'zero tolerance' policy for people caught coming into the United States illegally.
'I felt like I had been kicked in the gut when I found out what was happening,' she said in an emotional interview with ABC News on Sunday. 'I don't believe in families ripped apart; I just don't.
The 30-year old added, 'I don't think it's right and without a plan to reunite them -- that's completely unimaginable, and unthinkable and it's wrong.'
She also signed-on to #BreakBreadNotFamilies, which is a 24-hour hunger strike and prayer chain that will last 24 days in honor of the 2,4000 children separated from their parents.
“It’s a small price to pay considering what families are going through,” she told People.
Evan documented some of her journey on Instagram.
One picture shows her playing with a young boy at a shelter in McAllen, Texas with the caption: 'Just hung out with some of the families at one of the shelters people are sent to while they are being processed or awaiting deportation. Played with the kids for hours. They were so sweet, insanely smart, and creative. They have obviously been thru a lot and need supplies and medicine.' #EvanInTX.
In another photo she is seen carrying supplies inside a local store with a caption meant to inspire her 450,000 social media followers.
'Certain organizations, like The Red Cross, have not been “given permission” to donate supplies. But you can.' #EvanInTX.
Evan donated things like clothes, shoes, toothbrushes, shampoo, body soap, and diapers but she said the thing that seemed to mattered the most was showing these people that they were valued.
Amid the massive backlash to the separation policy, President Trump signed an executive order reversing his policy on Wednesday.
As of Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security maintain the U.S. government had reunited 522 migrant children who were separated from adults.
‘Frozen 2’: Evan Rachel Wood, Sterling K. Brown in Talks for Sequel
Evan Rachel Wood and Sterling K. Brown are in talks to lend their voices to Disney’s “Frozen 2,” the sequel to the 2013 smash hit.
Idina Menzel, Kristen Bell, and Josh Gad are returning to reprise their roles as Elsa, Anna, and Olaf, respectively.
Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck will also be back to direct. Lee is writing the script, while Peter Del Vecho is producing the animated film.
“Frozen 2” is set to bow on Nov. 27, 2019.
“Frozen” generated nearly $1.3 billion at the worldwide box office and has become a merchandising juggernaut, breaking sales records on home video and at Disney’s stores. The musical won the Academy Award for best animated film in 2014.
The movie has also been adapted for the stage, becoming a Broadway hit and earning three Tony Award nominations this year.
Lee was recently named chief creative officer at Walt Disney Animation Studios, following John Lasseter’s departure. She will split Lasseter’s duties with Pete Docter, who will oversee Pixar Animation Studios.
Both Wood and Brown are hot off the heels of their Emmy nominations, announced on Thursday morning. Wood is up for her work on HBO’s “Westworld,” and Brown is nominated for NBC’s “This Is Us” and Fox’s “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”
Westworld Is Finally Back. And Its Women Are Ready to Take Over
Thandie Newton likes to take the lead. When I meet her, co-star Evan Rachel Wood and Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy–three of the HBO show’s fierce women–in a Los Angeles hotel suite, I dither about whether we should sit on a sectional sofa or around a table. Newton directs us to the table. “This is serious,” she says. “A table creates a kind of boundary. Let’s not be on the couch about any of this.”
Westworld combines cowboys and robots with high-octane violence and a trippy take on artificial intelligence, but it’s also a show with a great deal on its mind. It’s among TV’s most fiercely feminist visions, a series that subverts traditionally masculine genres like the cowboy serial and the sci-fi mind bender by giving women, well, a seat at the table. The show takes the iconography of the American West–would-be Marlboro Men, on steeds with six-shooters in hand, ready to save the maiden or terrorize her–and flips it. By the end of Westworld‘s first season, the women have seized control.
The new season (premiering on April 22) takes the show’s long-simmering tensions and ignites them. Westworld, which began airing before the 2016 election kicked off the current reckoning with sexual assault and misogyny, returns to a world in which the experience of women pushed past their limit has become central to our national conversation. “We’re all becoming more awake to that idea right now–the search for truth,” says Wood.
And as the show takes its first steps into a new world, it’s a provocative statement suited for a moment that is just beginning to dawn. It’s a show on the precipice of going from hit to era-defining smash–all thanks to the women at the center of its spectacle.
Watching Westworld feels unlike watching anything else. Based on a 1973 movie directed by sci-fi maestro Michael Crichton, the show is set at an Old West–themed park and populated by robotic “hosts” who have been programmed to act out a cowpoke pantomime on loop. Guests are allowed to do whatever they want with these bodies: some choose to rescue and save them, while others have more sinister intentions. Scenes shift from the mostly idyllic life of the hosts–which are often interrupted by strange and chaotic outbursts of violence–to the futuristic world of their makers, who attempt to calibrate the robots and keep them in line.
As damsel in distress Dolores and jaded town madam Maeve, Wood and Newton play hosts whose minds are designed to be erased after each encounter. But suddenly, their minds begin holding on to memories of trauma. Their journeys get more attention than do those of the show’s men. Stars like Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright and Ed Harris simply don’t have as much to do. They’re obstacles, helpers or foils, while the heroines manifest their own destinies. By season’s end, Maeve embarks on a quest that promises to take her deeper into the show’s universe, while Dolores takes up arms to lead the rebellion, a blue-smocked Liberty leading the humanoids.
In just one season, Westworld has become one of the biggest shows on earth. “There are hundreds of people working every single day,” says Joy, who runs the show with her husband, The Dark Knight co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan; J.J. Abrams is another executive producer. The show’s visual dazzle is twofold–in its careful reconstruction of the Gunsmoke America that lives in our shared imagination, and in its invention of a future where life is conjured by science that looks like magic. Westworld‘s grandeur has paid off. Its first season was HBO’s highest-rated debut ever, and it was nominated for Golden Globes and Emmys for Best Drama, along with nominations for Wood and Newton at both ceremonies.
Westworld brings together mass-appealing spectacle with critical approval–perhaps the first show to do that since network mate Game of Thrones. Like that show, Westworldgets much of its story’s momentum from nudity and from violence done against women, like when Harris’ character drags Dolores into a barn, seemingly to rape her. But such scenes do more than establish stakes; they create the necessary conditions to foment revolution. In her first meeting with Nolan and Joy, over Skype, Newton recalls, “they very eloquently described the vision for the show. They were going to subvert incredibly poignant and important themes about how women are represented, and would I mind being naked while I did it.” She said yes.
Joy knows it can be tough for actors to shoot those scenes–especially Wood, who testified before Congress in February about her own experience of sexual assault in efforts to secure an assault survivors’ bill of rights. “I do everything I can to make the set a safe place,” Joy says. “And if it doesn’t feel safe, you have to tell us, and your voice will be heard.”
Wood, who has acted since she was a child–her breakthrough was the youth-rebellion drama Thirteen–has found meaning in this role. “It comes from a very vulnerable, tortured place,” she says. And Newton, an industry veteran with credits including the Mission: Impossible franchise and Crash, had until Westworld been denied opportunities her white counterparts might expect. “I’ve had a really rough road in the 30 years I’ve been acting,” she says. Newton had been prepared to quit before that Skype call. “I came back into myself as an actress and woman and mother and activist,” she says. “Right when I’d given up, I arrived at Westworld.”
Like other projects that now seem more resonant thanks to the culture-wide awakening around assault–among them the TV show The Handmaid’s Tale and the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri—Westworld now feels urgently relevant. Each of those projects was under way before the 2016 election kicked off the current reckoning, and Westworld began airing just a month before ballots were cast. The show had already staked out the terrain of a social crisis that only later made headlines. “People say, ‘You’re so lucky this is so timely,’ and I’m like, ‘No, this is timeless,'” says Joy. “These are things we have struggled with since time immemorial.”
In conversation, Joy takes an empathetic backseat to her stars. As Newton tears up discussing her growing rapport with Wood, I sneak a look at Joy, who’s openly crying. Despite all the emotional brinkmanship and re-enactment of violent trauma that Wood and Newton are asked to do, both feel secure throughout. “It’s allowing people to see they don’t have to be egomaniacs,” Newton says. “They don’t have to be all about themselves. They can be vulnerable.”
“Women are conditioned to be separate, to be pitted against each other,” says Wood. “That’s conditioning. And that keeps us powerless.” On Westworld, the power of three creative women compounds itself, gaining emotional and narrative power not just as a response to bad news but also as an examination of what it means to live through trauma, to overcome it and to fight back. Its second season may be less the show to heal us than the show with the vivid imagination to show us what’s possible. It’s a vision of a future where women don’t play by their own rules. They make their own.
'Westworld' enters a new world for its second season: The revolution will be televised
A surprising thing happened in the year and a half since the first season of "Westworld" confounded and attracted viewers with its knotted story of a futuristic android uprising at a patriarchal Western theme park.
At the center of the revolt on different fronts were "hosts" Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (Thandie Newton) — both of whom suffered horrific abuse and menace in carrying out their duties catering to the park's wealthy, pleasure-seeking male patrons. With the arrival of the second season April 22, the show's vision of a dark, cynical tomorrow has moved past its source material's roots of sci-fi entertainment to resemble a troubling reflection of what's happening in the country's political and cultural divides, as well as its #MeToo moment.
"It's even more relevant now. Absolutely," says Wood, dressed in a bright blue suit during a recent junket at a Beverly Hills hotel. In the first season, Dolores, a rancher's daughter who is one of the longest-serving "hosts" in the park, has the simple optimism of her programming shattered and winds up as a leader in a robot revolution.
"It certainly adds extra weight to season two, because season two is very much about the revolution and about the oppressed coming to take their power back," says Wood. "I think it could be a metaphor for any kind of oppressed group of people or minority."
Her co-star, however, is less convinced. In a separate interview, Newton, who plays the world-weary brothel madam Maeve, pauses upon being asked about the show's topicality in a changing world. She finally says, "The role was the role regardless."
But Newton also sees a metaphor in the show's conceit: "We're talking about what happens in Westworld stays in Westworld, and you can go and you can [sleep with] whoever you want, you can shoot whoever you want, you can rape whoever you want. That's happening right now in the world."
"I know without a doubt that we are not using rape as wallpaper, like some shows do, okay?" she says, her voice quickening. "I'm not being specific about which because it would not be good for my career, but do we have a responsibility? Well, it turns out we don't because nobody really applies that sense of responsibility. But I think [creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy] do."
The husband-and-wife creators are following up on the same objective this season that they had from the start, riffing on science fiction and western touchstones that flavored its source material (both the Michael Crichton novel and its 1973 film adaptation) while not being beholden to it.
In the first season, the dotted line connection to the film was drawn from its most recognizable figure — Yul Brynner's gunslinging cowboy in black — but the show's penchant for upending expectations was vividly illustrated with the character shifting from a murderous robot to a murderous human, portrayed by Ed Harris.
And instead of being about a glitch that leads to violence akin to "Jurassic Park," "Westworld" is more about the chaotic first steps of a new species.
"This is where our story was always going," Nolan says when asked if the current climate had any impact on their writing. "It's a Western, but it's also told from the perspective of, in video game terms, the nonplayer characters. You're dealing with the characters who have been marginalized within the world of the park itself. It's about Maeve, and it's about Dolores."
Of course, one of the most talked about — and controversial — ways "Westworld" told that story involved overlapping timelines, one with Harris' Man in Black seeking an answer to the world's puzzle while tormenting Dolores (he rapes her in the pilot episode), and the other with his younger self (Jimmi Simpson), who was in love with Dolores.
The series blurred the line easily from scene to scene, a disorienting choice that was anchored by the never-aging Dolores. The conceit was finally revealed in the season finale, frustrating some viewers who had thought there was only a single narrative.
Shuffling timelines is a familiar move for Nolan, who was in college when he wrote the amnesia-shaded short story that inspired his brother Christopher's breakthrough film, "Memento." But like that movie, the choice in "Westworld" was more than a structural gambit.
"It was rooted in the lens from which our protagonists saw their world," says Joy, seated on a sofa next to Nolan. "They did not understand when they were, you know? They didn't even understand that they didn't understand when they were.
"We didn't plot it out like, 'And then we'll be like "Gotcha!"' It came from a place of naturalism and trying to build empathy for these characters."
Of course, now that the black hat is out of the bag, Nolan and Joy don't get to use the effect again, right?
Nolan shifts in his seat with a sly smile. "Do you?"
Both are cagey about the new season, allowing that a new park — the Kurosawa-inspired Shogun World, which was teased in the last season finale — will emerge (a recently launched website "Delos Destinations" showed four more still-hidden worlds that are part of the park's corporate family) and that viewers will see the world outside the parks as well. "
The series places such a premium on secrecy that the cast often found itself in the dark during production. Wood remembers working on scenes for episodes she hadn't yet read without knowing what happened leading up to them, a challenge she called "a crazy acting exercise."
"I'm starting to think they're doing to us what they talk about doing to the guests in 'Westworld,'" she says with a grin. "Where they strip you down to your primal self and create a sense of urgency so that you're your most honest."
Though Nolan describes a season two led by a self-aware Dolores as "playing cards up" as far as what the audience understands, he still holds them close to the vest.
In April, he had a little fun when he teased on Reddit that he would release some spoilers of the new season, claiming it would help manage fan theories that revealed too much last season. The subsequent video begins with a dazed Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), who runs Westworld's programming division, waking up on a beach and ends with Wood gamely singing Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" backed on piano by prostitute and fellow host Clementine (Angela Sarafyan).
"Westworld" may be set in the future, but its taste for trolling is very 2018.
But working under such ambiguity proved difficult for Newton. While Dolores kick-started the revolt last season by killing Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the park's creator, Maeve initiates a bloody scheme to escape the park. But on her way out, she changes her mind and returns. .
It was a twist that disappointed Newton but, she says, also keeps delivering rewards.
"I had to have no ideas for my character [during production], which was really hard," she says. "And almost a betrayal because it's like, this is mine. I made her. I stripped naked in order to present her as she truly is and needs to be. And my nudity is profoundly disturbing because of the way it's been exploited in the past, both in film and in my life, right? So it was a big deal and something I did wholeheartedly because it made sense, and I felt that it had enormous value."
She says, "It was kind of like, you know those dreams that you have where you're trying to get somewhere, and you can't run, you're in slo-mo? Your legs can't move?
Westworld season 2 brings back several missing characters
More characters survived the Westworld season 1 finale’s mayhem than you might think. The upcoming second season of HBO’s acclaimed sci-fi hit dives headlong into Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) leading a robo-revolution to seize control of the futuristic theme park. But last season’s finale mayhem, the lack of certain characters in season 2’s trailers — and the silent hush around the show’s new narrative in general — has led to some uncertainty among some fans about who exactly is coming back this year, and who is not.
We spoke to showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy and managed to get a few tidbits on what we can expect for some of the characters whose fates were left uncertain:
The Man in Black (Ed Harris) and William (Jimmi Simpson): The theme park’s VIP guest is very much alive and has a new mission in season 2 (“He gets a bit of damage done to him, that’s for sure,” Harris teases). We’ll also see his younger incarnation, William, as we explore the early days of the park and discover how he gained so much influence over Delos Incorporated.
Elsie Hughes (Shannon Woodward) and Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth): Smart-ass programmer Hughes vanished near the end of season 1, while wary security chief Stubbs was captured by a tribe of Native American hosts when he went looking for her. Both are alive, but not exactly doing so hot. “They’re finally getting to experience Westworld as guests and not in the managerial halls, but I’m not sure they’re enjoying their experience,” Joy says dryly.
Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson): Delos’ icy corporate villainous also survived the board meeting from hell. “She is back and causes trouble,” Joy says. “She went from this controlled person playing this chess game with Ford. He takes out her king and queen in one fell swoop. Now she’s left at the mercy of the hosts like everyone else.”
Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman): The park’s arrogant head writer becomes Maeve’s (Thandie Newton) hostage at the start of the new season. “He’s found himself in the most uncomfortable position he can possibly be in,” Quarterman says. “These hosts have always been props to his stories, and now it’s like he’s become a player in one of his own stories.”
Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum): Dolores’ creepy, Shakespeare-quoting father was last seen being brought out of cold storage as part of Charlotte Hale’s scheme to smuggle data out of the park. He was supposed to be put on a train to leave. Did he make it out? We’re told he will be in the season and has become “an important asset,” one of only two characters that Dolores has any attachment to (the other, of course, is Teddy).
Clementine Pennyfeather (Angela Sarafyan): Brothel worker Clementine was effectively lobotomized and put into storage, but then she unexpectedly popped up again during the finale mayhem to take a shot at The Man in Black (she’s barely recognizable in the scene). We don’t have much intel on this one, but the showrunners have previously noted that last season’s operation resulted in the previous version of her character being changed forever.
Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins): Ford was really and truly killed by Dolores in the season 1 finale. He’s not expected to return as played by Hopkins. We will, however, see a younger version of Dr. Ford in flashbacks played by another actor at some point.
