Go behind the scenes of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful: City of Angels

Penny Dreadful was a big cult hit when it aired on Showtime a couple years back. A baroque supernatural thriller, the show leaned hard on Eva Green as Vanessa Ives, a darkly mysterious woman torn between light and dark. Now, creator John Logan is following up with a new series: Penny Dreadful: City of Angels. It’s not explicitly connected to the old one, but as you can tell from the trailer, it has some of the same rich atmosphere:

And there’s also another excellent actress vamping up at the center of things. That’s Game of Thrones veteran Natalie Dormer (Margaery Tyrell) as Magda, a supernatural being who believes that mankind is inherently evil, and is determined to manipulate it into destroying itself. And considering that she’s going about her business in 1938 L.A., right before the outbreak of World War II, she has a lot to work with.

The show will explore the rise of white nationalism, ethic prejudice, and other touchy subjects. Dormer looks like she’s going to steal her fair share of scenes, but the lead character is actually Tiago Vega (Daniel Zovatto), the first chicano officer on the L.A.P.D. Nathan Lane plays his older, grizzled partner, and Lorenza Izzo portrays Santa Muerte, Magna’s less misanthropic sister, who ferries the souls of the recently dead to the afterlife.

You can learn about all of this in the behind-the-scenes video below, where the actors talk through their characters themselves.

Lane describes his character, Lewis Michener, as “the moral conscious of the show,” although he still does “some dark things.” I don’t think this is going to be the kind of show where anyone can lay claim to absolute moral purity. You’ll also see Rory Kinnear — who played Frankenstein’s monster on the original show and is now a German Nazi living in America as a physician — talking about how this carries on the legacy of the first. “The continuity from the first iteration of Penny Dreadful to this one is the supernatural element in which monsters are present but the main monsters are within the characters.”

But again, Dormer kind of steals the show, giving us a glimpse of how Magda will take on different forms as she does her dirty work. “Magna is obviously carrying an anger inside of her,” she says as Magna stalks through a field which lights on fire as she passes. You don’t say.

I’ll let Zovatto have the last word: “It’s intense. I mean, it is dreadful.”

I’m looking forward to this one. Penny Dreadful: City of Angels will premiere on Showtime on April 26.

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