His Dark Materials season 2 is coming. The cast and crew tell us about changes to the books, new characters, new themes and what their dæmons are.
The second season of His Dark Materials will be on HBO before you know it, and things are looking up. The first season was solid, but the second adapts The Subtle Knife, the best (if you ask me) book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The stakes are raised, the scope widens, and things start proper crazy.
The cast and crew of the show talked about what to expect from the new season in a digital roundtable, and WiC was there to get the scoop. Executive producer Jane Tranter promises “more of everything.”
“In season 1, we had a witch. In season 2, we had witches, and we have angels,” Tranter said. “In season 1, Lyra was going north in search of Roger and was intrigued by Dust. In season 2, Lyra is going to other worlds to look for Dust and is grieving for Roger. So everything is just kind of building an expanding…There are many new characters and excitements.”
If you’ve read The Subtle Knife, you know that things get a bit darker, too. Given what happened at the end of season 1, it’d be hard for them not to. Lyra (Dafne Keen) tried to save her friend Roger only for her own father, Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) to kill him as part of a process to open a door to another world. Meanwhile, Will Parry (Amir Wilson), who lives in our world, killed someone who threatened himself and his mother, and is on the lam. “Series 1 had elements of a romp…Here it’s much more people looking into their souls a bit,” said writer Jack Thorne. “Series 2 is about trust, it’s about learning to trust each other and learning to trust yourself.”
Neither Will nor Lyra are particularly primed to trust other people, but as we can see in the trailer, they will meet in the eerily abandoned city of Cittàgazze. According to Thorne, “they’ve got to learn to trust each other and trust themselves as they’re about to discover their destiny.”
Dafne Keen also weighed in on this new direction. “I was really excited to explore Lyra’s more obviously vulnerable side,” she said. “In season 2 we really get to see this more quiet, really introverted version of Lyra.” She switches from trusting everyone to “this dark place” where her father has betrayed her and her family is basically dead and even the alethiometer has lied to her. “‘I am alone. I am completely alone.'”
And Will in a similar place. “They’re like a puzzle, they complete each other,” said Amir Wilson. “It’s quite moving to see how another person can save you from such horror.”
Also, if you just want to ogle the environments, it sounds like the Cittàgazze set is amazing. “It was just so realistic,” Keen said. “It actually felt like you were in this different city in a different world.”
Meet Dr. Mary Malone
As Tranter said, His Dark Materials season 2 will also see the addition of new characters. The biggest is probably Dr. Mary Malone, an astrophysicist and former nun studying dark matter. It’s a pretty heady subject, but Lyra has no trouble making sense of it, and changes Mary’s life forever.
Mary Malone is played by Irish actor Simone Kirby, and based on what I saw in the roundtable, she seems like the perfect person to bring this beloved character to life.
NEW YORK, NY – APRIL 22: Simone Kirby attends the ‘Jimmy’s Hall’ premiere during the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival at SVA Theater on April 22, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Robin Marchant/Getty Images for the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival)
To start, she’s a big His Dark Materials fan, having read and loved the series years ago. She refers back to the books often to make sure she’s getting the performance right, and will sometimes wander the sets just to see what they’re doing. “I didn’t get to see any of the witches, so I’m dying to see all of that.”
"I felt like I understood [Mary Malone when I read the books], her kind of struggle with spirituality and science and logic, but believing that there’s something else beyond what we can see…And while that’s very complex about her, everything else about her is really simple. She’s not like the other grown-ups in these books. She’s not looking to get power [and] she’s not greedy or sinister. Everything else about her is quite simple, but her own internal struggles with her own spirituality and all of that, that’s quite complex…I can understand that. I get her."
Mary Malone won’t show up until the second episode, and I’m really excited to see what Kirby will do with the character.
Changes to the books
The first season of His Dark Materials changed some pretty major things about the first book in the series, The Golden Compass. For example, it introduced Will Parry early; on the page he doesn’t appear until The Subtle Knife.
We asked Jack Thorne if there were any changes of that scale coming this time. “There isn’t sort of that major shock, but there’s a series of micro-shocks that together…probably challenge the foundations in a more interesting way,” he said.
"We are not trying to do something different the books…Sometimes we do step away and do different things, but always we’re going back to the text and saying, ‘How does this help us tell his story best?’"
Changes also came courtesy of the show’s new writing team; for season 1, Thorne wrote every episode himself, but this time around he has help. “They really did bring scope and challenged us in really interesting ways.” Apparently they took the witches in a direction Thorne didn’t originally intend, helping to deepen their plotline.
“Philip has written the most incredible fiction that is so full of ideas that it’s constantly eluding you,” Thorne continued. “And actually that is a real gift as a screenwriter. As soon as you know where you are, you’re sort of in trouble because you’re…sort of descending into tropes. You’re sort of descending into things that have been seen before. With Philip, you’re never allowed to. He’s always punching you in the face, basically, and I love being punched in the face by Philip Pullman.”
His Dark Materials season 3?
There are three books in the His Dark Materials series, with season 1 adapting the first and season 2 adapting the second. That leaves only The Amber Spyglass, the longest in the series. We haven’t heard anything official about season 3 happening, but it sounds like the team is laying the foundations even if they couldn’t provide many details.
His Dark Materials season 2 was shot mostly before COVID-19 shut down film and TV production around the world, although there was one episode left on the cutting room floor: a standalone story about what Lord Asriel is doing during the events of The Subtle Knife, since he doesn’t show up much in that book. “We shot with James McAvoy for about four hours, and then we had to close down,” Tranter said. “It was the week of March 16, when everything sort of closed down…That meant that in post-production we had to edit around the missing episode.”
Even though the episode stood on its own, “there was loads of answers to questions within the body of that episode and loads of new questions posed.” Maybe some of the ideas from that episode could make their way into a third season?
Or maybe they could even appear in an adaptation of The Book of Dust, Pullman’s in-progress His Dark Materials sequel series. Tranter would be “very excited” to turn The Book of Dust into a series. “If anyone gave us the opportunity we’d do it, we’d be there.”
Finally, of course the cast and crew had to tell us what they have for dæmons:
- Amir Wilson: golden eagle
- Darne Keen: monkey
- Simone Kirby: rabbit
- Ariyon Bakare (Lord Boreal): dolphin (he’d be fine living at sea)
- Jack Thorne: woodpecker
- Jane Tranter: thought it’d be a wolf, but more likely a pony
His Dark Materials season 2 premieres on HBO on November 17.
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