Shooting on His Dark Materials season 2 is finished, and season 1 hasn’t even aired

On Friday, His Dark Materials cast member posted a quick video announcing that he was done shooting the second season of His Dark Materials, an upcoming HBO/BBC adaptation of Philip Pullman’s book series:

The first season of His Dark Materials premieres on November 4. It tells the story of Lyra Belacqua (Dafne Keen), a precocious girl living at Oxford’s Jordan College with her uncle Asriel (James McAvoy), who comes under fire when he presents potentially blasphemous findings about a mysterious particle called Dust. From there, Lyra gets caught up in a kidnapping plot, an assassination attempt on her uncle’s life, a band of armored talking bears, and so on.

The first season will be based on the first book in Pullmlan’s trilogy, The Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in the U.S.), and if they do it right, it could be fantastic. Miranda plays Lee Scoresby, a Texan aeronaut.

But how, you may ask, can Miranda be wrapping on season 2 when season 1 hasn’t even premiered? It ends up that executive producer Jane Tranter and company got a two-season order from HBO/BBC, with the second season adapting the second book in the trilogy, The Subtle Knife. Why shoot these two seasons back to back? Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Trotter explained that it had to do with the young age of her star. I mean, whatever happens if you wait a year to film the second season and the now-14-year-old Keen has gone through a growth spurt? Considering that The Subtle Knife picks up just moments after The Northern Lights, it could be hard to explain:

"Suddenly they’re six inches taller and they’re a different shape and their voices are different. Our feeling was we really couldn’t leave more than a very small gap between the end of when Dafne Keen finished filming, which was December 2018, and when she started again, July 2019. That was basically the biggest gap that we could possibly do and still have her come back and convincingly look like it was moments, hours later [in season 2]. The BBC and HBO very kindly said, ‘Let’s make 16 episodes across the two books and go for it.’ So, I consider it more of a staggered, large first commitment rather than, ‘Oooh! Here’s two seasons up front.’"

Indeed, working with child actors on longform stories can be very tricky. The most recent example of a network trying it is HBO with Game of Thrones. They lucked out with Maisie Williams (Arya Stark), who grew into a woman who looks capable of playing younger than she is. They pulled it off with Sophie Turner (Sansa), too. But Isaac Hempstead Wright (Bran Stark) went through a very noticeable growth spurt while the show was shooting:

His Dark Materials has another young protagonist introduced in the second book: Will Parry, played on the show by Amir Wilson.

Since Wilson presumably didn’t have to film any scenes for the first season at all, his casting probably didn’t present much of an issue. But what happens when and if the producers get around to shooting The Amber Spyglass, the third book in Pullman’s trilogy? It doesn’t pick up right after the events of the The Subtle Knife, but there isn’t a huge gap or anything.

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I guess HBO/BBC will cross that bridge when they come to it. For now, I’m just looking forward to this series being done justice.

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