American Gods season 3 will “partially finish the book”

Ian McShane (Wednesday) talks about the new season of American Gods, as well as John Wick 4, which is coming down the pike.

With American Gods finally back on our screens, Ian McShane (Mr. Wednesday, aka Odin) sat down with Collider to talk through the latest season of the show.

After a second season that divided critics — with even McShane admitting “you want the show to be a bit better when you’re contracted to it” — the Englishman was excited about the new slate of episodes. “This year, you’ve got [star Ricky Whittle’s] character going to Lakeside, which is part of the book, and Wednesday bringing him back and being up to his usual tricks,” he explained. “This has been such a roller coaster ride with the show, there could be a fourth season and it could be anything, whatever they want to make it into because that’s what the book is. I remember my reaction to the book when I read it, thinking this could be phenomenal because, for a showrunner, there’s so many areas you can go into, for each character. It’s still evolving.”

"As a producer on the show, I have a bit of clout in saying where my character is going. I do think we had to get away from me and Ricky in a car. Even though it’s in the book and it’s very important, we had to get away from that to make Ricky more of a pro-active character on his own. It’s Shadow’s story and his journey, so we had to make him more pro-active, and I think we’ve done that by putting him in Lakeside, and then having Wednesday roaming the earth, as usual. We tried to establish that in the last episode of Season 2, by having Wednesday leave when it all went tits up, as we say, as they were closing in. You know that Wednesday is the hand behind the scenes, guiding the signs to whatever Shadow is doing while allowing Shadow the freedom of thinking that he’s his own man, and seeing him finally become his own man. We do actually partially finish the book, up to a point, in Season 3, which had to be done, in order to decide whether to stop now or to go on with something else."

They “finish the book,” huh? If they do that, making season 4 might be a little tricky.

That is, unless the author of the original book writes a sequel. Speaking to Digital Spy, Neil Gaiman sounded like it may well happen. “The nice thing about having the next American Gods book plotted in my head for a very, very long time, is that for each of the sets of showrunners, I’ve been able to sit them down and say, ‘OK, this is what is happening in the next American Gods book. Which means that this scene, which you might have been tempted to leave out, will become incredibly important later. So please make sure that you shoot it. You are going to want to have that character knocking around, because, trust me, that character is going to become huge.”

Okay, but are we actually going to get that book? “I would love to have written another American Gods novel before we get that far,” Gaiman said. We’ll be here.

As for other projects, McShane also teased his role in the forthcoming fourth film in the John Wick franchise. “Keanu [Reeves] and I exchanged New Year’s greetings and said, ‘Hope to see you this year.’ I know the script is being written and they’re hoping to do it this year. I know they announced they were gonna do 4 and 5 together, but who knows. The studios announce all sorts of things. No doubt, at some point this year, we’re gonna do John Wick 4.”

And once again, we’ll be here.

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