David Benioff and Dan Weiss are the creators and showrunners behind Game of Thrones, the biggest show in HBO's history and one of the most talked-about, successful TV series of the 2010s. Game of Thrones ended in a flurry of controversy in 2019. What, people asked, would Benioff and Weiss do next?
Well, they bounced around for a while before figuring that out. They were gonna make another show for HBO, but that fizzled out. Then they were gonna make Star Wars movies, but that fell apart. Eventually they signed a deal with Netflix and made a fun, small scale dramady called The Chair, which was about as far away from the mega-budget Game of Thrones as you could get. But now they're ready to come back to large-scale TV with 3 Body Problem, an upcoming sci-fi show on Netflix.
3 Body Problem is based on the Remembrance of Earth's Past novel trilogy by Liu Cixin. It's about a group of scientists who uncover a conspiracy that may involve humanity's first contact with an alien civilization. The books talk a lot of talk about quantum theory, astrophysics, nanotech and other hard sci-fi concepts. It's a challenging story to adapt to screen, but so was George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. If anybody can do it, it's David Benioff and Dan Weiss.
Like Game of Thrones, 3 Body Problem has a large cast of characters, a story that spans centuries, and a lot of wildly imaginative sequences that will be very hard to translate to TV. Benioff and Weiss have drafted a bunch of their old Game of Thrones colleagues to help bring the books to life. Some faces you'll remember from back when they were stomping around Westeros. Others worked behind the camera but were crucial to the success of the first show and will be just as important to this one.
So who from Game of Thrones, besides Benioff and Weiss themselves, is crossing over to 3 Body Problem? Let's take roll call:
John Bradley (Sam from Game of Thrones) as Jack Rooney
On Game of Thrones, John Bradley played Samwell Tarly, the brainy, sensitive Night's Watchmen who dreamed of being a wizard but settled for becoming a maester. Best friend to Jon Snow, Sam was one of the few characters to survive the entire series and get a happy ending, not to mention lots of fans.
In 3 Body Problem, Bradley plays a character named Jack Rooney, a food scientist who studied physics at Oxford with four of the other main characters. “Dan and David said, ‘It’s a character that’s as close to you as you’ll ever play,’ ” Bradley told The Hollywood Reporter. “And it’s interesting when somebody says they’ve written a part that they think is you because, it’s like: ‘What do you think I’m like?’ I just think they were sick of people saying how nice I am all the time.”
That last part, "I just think they were sick of people saying how nice I am," implies that Jack isn't a likable as Sam. Perhaps Jack has a harder edge to him, which could be a fun thing to see Bradley play.
Notably, Jack Rooney is not a character from the original Three-Body Problem novel. In that book, we follow a nanotechnology professor named Wang Miao, who investigates the strange disappearances of scientists around the world. The show seems to have taken Wang Miao's duties as the protagonist and split them up among several characters, including Jack Rooney. It's too early to say whether that's a good idea, but at least it means more screentime for Bradley.
Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth from Game of Thrones) as Thomas Wade
Like Samwell Tarly, Davos Seaworth was one of the most likable characters on Game of Thrones. The second-in-command to Stannis Baratheon and later to Jon Snow, Davos was loyal, honest and clever. He was smart enough to play the game of thrones but had enough integrity not to play dirty. He actually ended up on the Small Council in King's Landing with Sam at the end of the series, another rare happy ending for the show.
Once again, it sounds like Benioff and Weiss are casting against type. In 3 Body Problem, Cunningham will play a member of the intelligence community named Thomas Wade. "He’s going to be a bit of a shock for people who think I play one kind of character, shall we say?" Cunningham told Variety. "He’s a bit of a handful is Mr. Wade."
This first season of 3 Body Problem adapts the first book in Liu Cixin's trilogy, The Three-Body Problem. However, Thomas Wade doesn't show up until the third novel, Death's End. In that book, he's a ruthlessly ambitious CIA agent who has no qualms about doing some very unsavory things to grab power. I don't know how Benioff and Weiss are re-writing the narrative so Thomas Wade shows up earlier, but we can bet that he won't be much like Davos, who was the "soft moral compass" of Game of Thrones, as Cunningham puts it. Wade threw his moral compass in the garbage a long time ago, if he ever had one. This is Cunningham's chance to play a Lannister.
Benioff and Weiss seem to be having fun hiring actors from Game of Thrones and casting them in roles they know will surprise fans. However, there's one Game of Thrones alum whose role on 3 Body Problem will feel pretty familiar:
Jonathan Pryce (the High Sparrow from Game of Thrones) as Mike Evans
Jonathan Pryce was a famous actor known for movies like Brazil long before he joined the cast of Game of Thrones as the High Sparrow, the religious leader who famously locked Cersei Lannister in jail and then paraded her marched through the streets of King's Landing while a nun followed behind with a bell chanting "Shame!" And he went on to even more acclaim after his character died a fiery death, getting an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his role in The Two Popes and earning accolades for his portrayal of Prince Philip in Netflix's The Crown. Game of Thrones was lucky to have Jonathan Pryce, not the other way around.
Still, Pryce's character on 3 Body Problem bears some similarly to his Game of Thrones character. He plays Mike Evans, a super-rich misanthrope who uses his vast amounts of inherited wealth to...well, that would be spoiling things. But he's a super-rich misanthrope so you know he's up to no good. I can easily imagine Pryce employing the same distant, unnervingly calm stare he used to such great effect as the High Sparrow on Game of Thrones as Mike Evans on 3 Body Problem.
We meet Mike Evans at two points in his life: once as a younger man -- where I assume he will not be played by Jonathan Pryce -- and then later when he's older. Obviously, the 76-year-old Pryce will be playing the older Evans. As it was on Game of Thrones, 3 Body Problem is lucky to have him.
And those are all the actors from Game of Thrones who are coming over with Benioff and Weiss to 3 Body Problem. However, the showrunners are also recruiting a couple of their old crew members, who are just as important to the show's success:
Ramin Djawadi, composer
It takes more than great actors to make a great TV show. Benioff and Weiss recently mentioned in passing that Ramin Djawadi would be writing music for 3 Body Problem. Djwadi was the composer on Game of Thrones and has since composed music for the prequel show House of the Dragon. The Game of Thrones theme song became iconic almost immediately after the show premiered, so obviously this is someone you want working on your team.
And Djawadi was hardly a one-hit wonder. He produced lots of wonderful music for the show, so much that he was able to go to travel the world playing it with the Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience. One of my personal favorite pieces of his is "Light of the Seven," the haunting song that plays while Cersei blows up the Sept of Baelor in the season 6 finale.
For 3 Body Problem, Djawadi will switch from fantasy to sci-fi. But he's ready for that. During his time working on the HBO show Westworld, Djawadi earned accolades for his period-appropriate remixes of pop songs. The theme song to that show is also a banger, and of a very different character than anything he wrote for Game of Thrones.
All this is to say that Ramin Djawadi is talented, versatile, and one of the best composers working in TV today. If his work on 3 Body Problem is half as rich and exciting as what he's already done, viewers are in for a sonic treat.
Finally, an unsung hero of Game of Thrones is joining Benioff and Weiss on their journey into the future:
Bernadette Caulfield, executive producer
Bernadette Caulfield served as an executive producer on Game of Thrones and will do it again on 3 Body Problem. What exactly does an executive producer do? Is Caulfield's own words, it was her responsibility to take what Benioff and Weiss had written and "bring that script to life."
So for instance, remember that scene in the third season of Game of Thrones where Brienne of Tarth gets tossed into a fighting pit with a live bear? Well, it's one thing to write that in a script, and another to actually find a bear; that responsibility fell to Caulfield, who tracked down a bear actor named Little Bart. "I was so happy that A, I got HBO to agree to the bear and all of this, but that I got to work with a Grizzly bear, and I met a Grizzly bear. I mean, who gets to say that?" Caulfield told Democrat & Chronicle.
Basically, Caulfield makes things happen. Benioff once called her "the greatest producer alive." She was universally beloved on the Game of Thrones set. Lena Headey, who plays Cersei, called Caulfield “the true Mother of Dragons.” Sophie Turner, who played Sansa Stark, said Caulfield is “the woman that I want to grow up to be like.”
Caulfield is the least famous person on this list, but she might be the most important to the potential success of the new show. “There’s so many locations and none of them stick around — they’re so many one-offs,” Caulfield told THR. “There’s not one regular ‘Throne room’ in the whole show.” That means lots of complications, lots of opportunities for things to go wrong, and lots of need for someone with Caulfield's organizational and logistical talents.
It takes a village to make a TV show, and 3 Body Problem has many people working behind and in front of the camera in addition to this handful. But the fact that several of them have already worked together -- and on a show that just so happened to be an international phenomenon -- is good news. We'll see the fruits of their labors when the first season of 3 Body Problem drops on Netflix on March 21.
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