So, here’s the thing. “Foundation” season two is sneaky good. Sure, there are definitely more gratuitous hand-to-hand combat scenes that seem to be too obvious an attempt to broaden the show’s appeal, but with access to all 10 episodes, the melodrama sucked this writer into a two-day binge that went into the wee hours of the night. The public, on the other hand, will get one episode a week beginning July 14. Thanks to showrunner David S. Goyer and his crack team of writers, you’ll be eagerly awaiting each new release.
READ MORE: New “Foundation” Season 2 Trailer: Apple TV+’s epic Sci-Fi series returns on July 14
Set over a century after the season one finale, “Foundation” once again does a compelling job of following disparate storylines that end up weaving in and out of each other. The current emperor, Day (Lee Pace), is obsessed with breaking the cloning line and bringing in new blood to the genetic dynasty through an arranged marriage. Gaal (Lou Llobell) reawakens from another deep cryosleep with her “older” daughter Salvor (Leah Harvey) by her side and a virtual Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) to still pester her. And the Foundation itself has evolved into something else entirely in the 130 or so years since its founding (don’t worry, Seldon predicted it). And that’s just the tip of the iceberg to the compelling storylines imagined from a seminal sci-fi novel that no one could figure out how to adapt since it was first published in 1951.
The secret sauce for “Foundation’s” second go around isn’t its scripts (the narrative structure is super-compelling) or another stellar season of Emmy-worthy (or VES Awards for that matter) visual effects. Instead, it’s the genuine surprise that with a whole new crew of actors thrown into the mix, “Foundation” features one of the best ensembles on television. Period. A perfect example of this is Goyer’s instance on casting New Zealand actress Rachel House (“Hunt for the Wilderpeople”) in the role of Tellen Bond, the leader of a secret group of Menatlics who may not be as altruistic as they want you to believe.
“I just loved her and she’s the only person I had in mind to play that role,” Goyer recalls. “[I] was able to get her on a Zoom, and she said, ‘Why in the world do you want me for this? I tend to do comedy.’ I said, ‘I wrote it for you, you have to play it and I want you to play this villain,’ but she’s also a villain that you don’t know quite where to take her because she’s also quite honest, and very plain-spoken and she seems to lay her cards on the table. And is the character good? Is she bad? [Rachel is] wonderful. She’s also an amazing human being in real life. But yeah, Rachel House, I was like, ‘I’m going to get her, I’m going to have her play this role.’”
Needless to say, when House finally makes it on screen, her performance is well worth the wait.
Over the course of the rest of our conversation, Goyer explains the quality control for “Foundation’s” visual effects, how Pace gets to play a very different version of Day this time around, why this season was the right time to reveal Demerzel’s connection to Empire, and much, much more.
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The Playlist: After the success of the first season, did you and the writing team find it freeing to move forward knowing that you had found a way to adapt a novel many had struggled for decades to bring to either the big or small screen?
David S. Goyer: Yeah, yeah, more freedom and more apprehension, right? More freedom because we were no longer burdened with all the sort of heavy lifting and expositional work that was required of season one. I almost feel like the first three episodes of season one was just a lot of info-dumping and a lot of time-jumping. There were just necessary things that we had to get across how the Galactic Empire works, the genetic dynasty, psychohistory, The Foundation, just all of these crazy things. But we were liberated from all of that in season two, and we could kind of just shoot things out of a cannon and get going. And the benefit of that is that it also gave me more real estate to dig deeper into the characters and to get more emotional. And I felt like I had more license to, we wanted to introduce more levity, we wanted to introduce kind of different kinds of characters, not people that were wholly beholden to the foundation or beholden to Empire. I wanted to shake things up with the first episode and start with a number of scenes that people would not normally think of as Foundation scenes, because even though I love that the show is smart, I think some people felt in season one, “Oh, it might be too cerebral for me.” And so I very much wanted myself and the other writers to make season two more accessible so we could broaden our audience and make it more emotional. And then, of course, the anxiety is can we top ourselves, right? Can we do something even bigger and better and more gut-wrenching?
One of the conceits of this season is that a second crisis is sort of unfolding, and in theory, there’s a third crisis sort of down the road. As someone who has not read the book since I was a teenager, is that the one sort of framework from the book that you’re absolutely keeping for the show?
Yeah, yeah.
How many crises will there be in the series?
Well, when I loosely pitched to Apple TV+ I said, “We’re going to deal with a crisis a season.” So I had a roadmap and I pitched eight seasons because rightfully so, they wanted to know that I had some idea of where we were going, that we weren’t just making it up as we were going along because it’s a huge investment. And so there is a roadmap, doesn’t mean we don’t deviate from it from time to time. But yeah, roughly speaking, we will deal with a crisis, a season and this crisis, which was predicted at the end of season one, is war with empire.
And this is a very early question to ask considering people will not see the final episode of this season until September, I think, or maybe October.
Yeah, for about 12 weeks from now, yeah.
Do you have in your mind for when season three happens, what that crisis is?
Oh yeah, yeah. Without question. I mean, I know the broad strokes if we ever get there for all eight seasons, and I would say season three is pretty well mapped out. We had to have it fairly well mapped out in terms of writing season two. So all the broad strokes of season three and even many of the broad strokes of season four have already been mapped out. We’ve already broken some of that story so that we just weren’t making it up, that we were writing towards something.
I know it’s easy to say, “Oh, we just have an amazing casting director,” but there are a bunch of relatively unknown actors this season who are just eyebrow-raisingly good. The one performance that just keeps sticking out to me is Ella-Rae Smith, who has some credits but has never popped like this before. Can you talk first about her character without giving too much away and why you wanted to cast her?
Well, she’s kind of this spoiler element that’s introduced into the Empire and she’s brought in and Day 17 thinks he can kind of mansplain a bunch to her and bulldoze her. He picks her because she’s the youngest in her lineage and he thinks he can just use her politically. And she turns out to be a much more kind of crafty political operator than meets the eye. And it’s funny that you mentioned her because I saw her audition and then I had her read for me again for trybacks and callbacks, and I was blown away with her. But, I really had to fight for her. And I’m so glad you felt that way because I think she’s a massive superstar. And for whatever reason, not everyone saw it initially. And I was just blown away with her and I think she’s a treasure.
Oh, I am not kidding, I think it’s by the second or third episode she’s in, I literally sent a message to a friend chain of mine who are in the biz and I was like, “This name. You need to pay attention.” She’s that good.
It’s probably episode two in the dinner scene where she just kind of runs circles around everyone, yeah.
Yep, I think that’s where it starts. Switching topics, this season’s Day, obviously still played by Lee Pace, seems like a very different personality than the Days we’ve seen before. Even though they are clones, do you approach each Dawn, Day, and Dusk as though they are different characters every season?
That’s the magic trick, that’s the conceit and that’s the promise I made to each of those actors is that each season they will play a completely different character. So, with the writers for season two, we wrote character biographies that were internally for our writer’s room and said, “How are these people different?” As if they were played by completely different actors. And then we share those biographies and those early scripts with our actors, and Lee and the other actors bring in some of their own ideas and we build the characters together. But yeah, that’s the conceit. This is a completely different man. He was wholly different from the two Days that Lee played in Season One. And if we keep going, the character, the Day that he would play in the next season would be different yet again. And that’s one of the fun aspects of the genetic dynasty.