The theme of Westworld season 3 is “The New World”

On Saturday, the creators of Westworld (Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy), along with the show’s cast, took the stage in Hall H at the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con. They brought with them the official season 3 trailer. It gave fans a glimpse at a new Delos park called Warworld, Dolores and her robotic compatriots living and interacting with humans in the real world, and newcomer Aaron Paul’s (Breaking Bad) character, Caleb.

Each of Westworld’s previous two seasons had a theme: “The Maze” for season 1 and “the Door” for season 2. As Nolan confirmed at the panel, for season 3 the theme will be “The New World.”

“The thing about dystopia[s] is they could look pretty beautiful,” he said. “Just because the world is corrupt on the inside doesn’t mean it can’t be smoothed over and beautiful on the outside… and we’ve kind of been planning this from the beginning.”

In the season 2 finale, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) — inside the android body of Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) — escaped the park with five brain balls (basically host CPUs) with the express purpose of creating new bodies for them so they can take over the world, presumably.

According to Wood, in season 3 we’ll see different shades of Dolores. “I think this season there’s a good mixture of Dolores and Wyatt, but she’s still full of surprises, she’s still pretty ruthless,” she said. “[H]er interactions with Aaron [Paul] challenge her ideas about humanity.”

Because they knew about the season 2 body swap ahead of time, Wood gave Thompson some tips on how she plays Dolores, so eagle-eyed viewers could spot when Dolores was in control of Hale’s body. “There’s something that Dolores always does: whenever she sits down, her right hand is always in her left, and I passed it on to Tessa.”

Speaking of Charlotte Hale, Thompson talked about her character’s arc in season 3: “[O]ne of the things that I think is so daring is what does power look like in the future and can someone be incredibly powerful and [a] woman of color… and so often we don’t get to see that,” she said. “And also what happens when big business prioritizes the bottom line over people.”

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Aaron Paul is the newcomer to the Westworld cast for season 3. His character Caleb is a construction worker who owns his own robot named George. “Caleb has a complicated past as we all do, but he’s a bit of a white hat and black hat,” Paul said. “He’s just trying to survive in the world and sometimes he has to do bad things.”

In the very first teaser we got for season 3, Paul’s character is joined by Lena Waithe (The Chi). They seem to be carrying out some sort of heist using explosives. Perhaps that’s one of the “bad things” he’s referring to.

Returning cast member Jeffrey Wright (Bernard) praised Nolan and Joy’s vision for season 3. “I think we have a real gift in this gig, and that’s our bosses. We’ve got two of the most incredibly generous and also engaging and challenging leader[s] that you could ask for. So, I read the script, and I bombard them with questions, and I try to translate all that in a performance.”

Thandie Newton (Maeve) echoed that praise. “The setup is extraordinary with what we’ve been given,” she said. “[T]he second season, as an actress, was really hard for this incredible being who has learned so much and who manages to find her free will, and she has to sacrifice that.”

"With this new season, she’s an extremely expensive piece of hardware… so what I’m loving right now is what that gives her in terms of the choices she makes about her value… that’s the thing about these robots is that they’re never taught about their value, and I’m loving that agency."

Westworld season 3 will air at some point in 2020.

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h/t CBR