Cursed director shares her hopes for season 2

We still don’t know if Cursed is getting a second season, but if it does, director Sarah O’Gorman knows what she wants for Netflix’s Arthurian drama.

Sarah O’Gorman is a powerhouse TV director who’s had a hand in several medieval dramas that have been blowing up lately, including The Last Kingdom, The Witcher and the new show Cursed. She talked with us about what it was like working on the Netflix’s unique take on the Arthurian legend, starting with how she got involved with the project in the first place:

"For me, I got sent the scripts as I was filming Last Kingdom, and they wanted me to do the final two episodes, so they sent me the scripts, and said, ‘Look, we know you’re filming but here are the scripts, we don’t expect you to read them all. Maybe read the first one and then you’re two.’ So I started the first one, and then I just read through to [Episode 10] because I was so engaged with how it is told differently, from Nimue’s point of view. It feels like all of the characters are sort of twisted in a different way, which made it really interesting to me. I love the way Gustaf (Skarsgård) played Merlin, that was a take on Merlin I hadn’t seen before. It sort of got darker as the season went on. I liked that, how he played him. The unexpected is interesting, the way those characters were on page and hopefully on screen, were unexpected. I think that it is a re-imagining, and it’s told from Nimue’s point of view, which I hadn’t ‘t seen it before."

Traditionally, Nimue is the Lady of the Lake, who gifts King Arthur with the sword Excalibur. In Cursed, she has a much more active role.

If you ask me, it’s always fun to see the legends you know told from a different point of view. O’Gorman saw the changes as organic. “It wasn’t for the sake of doing something different, it was for the sake of the story. Last Kingdom is historical, Arthurian legend is a legend. So the Battle of Tettenhall happened for example, we learn about that in school, we learn about Aethelflaed. With Cursed, it must be a gift for a writer, because you have the starting point, but then you can just take it where you want to take it. I thought it was very organic, it didn’t feel like anything was pushed in there just for differences sake.”

O’Gorman sees some modern parallels between Cursed and the other shows she’s worked on. “It’s about displaced people, and senseless war. In broad strokes, Nimue is trying to find the courage to lead. It’s about a young woman who is garnering her power to help her people, and I think that does resonate. It really does. It’s also about family, and with TLK, Cursed, and The Witcher, they all have similar things really, which makes them sort of universally appealing. Which is why they work. At the core, they are orphans, people fighting for change. With those themes of segregation and oppression, I think it’s really relevant.”

I brought up my personal favorite scene: Arthur and Morgana’s attempt to reconnect as Morgana drifts down a path towards darkness. “You know, it’s great that that’s your favorite scene. It really is because, there’s so many more obvious scenes to choose, the bigger set pieces or what not.”

"I love that scene, it was incredible to do. To tell that story, which is a sibling story, it’s not a love story or a parent and child, it’s a sibling relationship, which is really interesting. I’ve worked with Shalom [Brune Franklin] before, so I have a very good relationship with her, and her and Devon [Terrell] do as well. It was similar to TLK really, we spoke about the scene at length separately, and then we rehearsed it together. And rehearsal to me is really important, I always hope the actors feel that from me. I will never rush a rehearsal because then you end up tweaking as you go on, and it unsettles them. So we rehearsed, and the emotion was there for them. It was quite near the end of the shoot, and it was lovely to film. When you rehearse it and it’s just you and the actors, and then you bring the crew in to see, when we showed that to the crew you could just feel a sort of stillness while they were watching. You could feel it was electric. It was just sort of silent when the crew went off to do their jobs, which is always lovely because they are just dealing with the raw emotion in the room."

Oh, to be a fly on the wall that day.

The first season of Cursed debuted to solid numbers, but we don’t know if we’re going to get a second season. But if we do, O’Gorman knows what she would like to see:

"It was left in such a good way, you have Iris with the Pope, where Nimue is; but to answer your question, without specifics, I would like to see all the characters continuing in their battles. To go back to that world which moves their story on, just to get to see what happens next. Tom Wheeler, who wrote the graphic novel, is fantastic, the ideas he has are brilliant. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with. Big changes could be coming for all of the characters."

Netflix, you have been appraised.

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