James Marsden teases Teddy’s return in Westworld season 4

The fourth season of HBO’s sci-fi drama Westworld premieres in only a few short days, but with a show this twisty you never quite know what to expect. We’re a long way from the early days when the show was about androids in a western-themed park for the super rich gaining sentience and rebelling against the brutality being committed against them on a daily basis. Season 3 of the high concept series saw the androids (called hosts) escape out into the real world, only to discover that humanity was similarly enslaved by an AI supercomputer called Rehoboam. Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) destroyed Rehoboam at the cost of her life, but in a show like Westworld, where three quarters of the cast can just be reconstructed in new bodies, it’s never safe to count anyone out.

We already know that Wood will be returning this year as a brand new character, Christina, a video game writer whose stories are accused of bearing an uncanny resemblance to reality. Another actor who’ll be back in season 4 is James Marsden, who played Dolores’ love interest Teddy back in the Westworld park. After Dolores reprogrammed the good-hearted Teddy to make him a coldblooded killer, he eventually committed suicide to get out of the cycle of violence.

We don’t know a lot about Marsden’s character this go-round, whether it’s the same Teddy or someone totally new. Entertainment Weekly reports that early footage shows Wood’s character Christina go on a date with someone who looks an awful lot like Marsden. The actor himself is on hand to tease us further.

James Marsden teases his return to Westworld

Marsden made a surprise appearance at the Westworld panel at ATX TV Festival in Austin earlier this month. “I just miss you guys. I miss talking about the show together,” he said to fellow cast members Wood, Tessa Thompson (Charlotte), Ed Harris (William), Jeffrey Wright (Bernard), and Angela Sarafyan (Clementine). Despite being a central part of the cast for the first two seasons, the actor was one of the most notable absences in season 3.

Then, only last week, Marsden sat down with EW to talk a bit more about his return to the show, saying he wants to “remain a little mysterious about where you find me in the first episode, if at all.”

“The themes of exploring human urges of violence and things like that are going to continue,” Marsden explained. “And this season maybe we explore what the world looks like after Dolores set the humans and the robots free. Are they going to cooperate or are they going to vie for control? What happens when they vie for control? Will the hosts inherit these urges of violence? Some of the basic things that we continue to explore on this show, and definitely in season 4 — we ask a lot of those questions. What happens next?”

We won’t have to wait long to find out.

Evan Rachel Wood thinks Westworld predicted the future

Of course, Marsden isn’t the only cast member out making the press rounds. /Film reports that Evan Rachel Wood has some pretty interesting thoughts about the new season, as well as the show as a whole. While Westworld is a science fiction series, some of the ideas behind it, such as the ethics of handling artificial intelligence and over-reliance on technology to the detriment of free will, are very relevant to our current moment. According to Wood, this ability to predict the future has always been a central part of Westworld.

“It’s the looming unknown,” Wood said. “It’s knowing that we must evolve and that technology is evolving at such a rapid rate now…I think it’s that just existential dread of where are we going? What is the cautionary tale? What could go right? What could go wrong? Let’s explore these ideas. And, maybe, hopefully, if you’re like Jonah [Nolan] and Lisa, you’re doing things. You have your pulse on the future and you’re doing things and writing things that are, I swear to God, there to help us and teach us and warn us.”

"If you go back and watch the first season, I think a lot of things that maybe didn’t make as much sense then probably make a lot of sense now. And I think that will continue to be the case with this show. And the more you go back and watch it, or the more time has passed and you go back and revisit, you’ll think, oh wow. Wow. They really knew where we were headed. And we thought we were so far away from this. And we actually were right on top of it."

We’re very much behind Wood’s sentiments here. Back when season 3 aired, we explored the question of whether a real-life Westworld might exist in our future, and found that it wasn’t quite so far-fetched as you might think. Science fiction has a history of predicting our future or at least forcing us to think about it, and Westworld is no exception.

Season 4 of Westworld premieres June 26 on HBO and HBO Max.

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