For the past two years, Cape Town Studios have been pretty much taken over by Ridley Scott’s production company Scott Free for the shooting of the HBO dystopian sci-fi series Raised by Wolves.
Created and written by Aaron Guzikowski, the show — the biggest ever to be shot in Africa — saw its first two episodes directed by Scott, who helped develop its distinctive look and feel.
Set in the future, the series follows the trials and tribulations of android couple Mother (Amanda Collins) and Father (Abubakar Salim) who land on the planet Kepler 22-b and are tasked with raising human embryos to secure the future of Earth’s atheist faction after a long and terrible battle with the religious zealots the Mithraic, who ultimately also find themselves on the planet, setting up a further fight between androids and humans for control of the philosophical and social future of the new civilisation.
As season two arrives on Showmax this week, the cast sat down to talk about their experiences and what the show’s increasingly devoted group of fans can expect as the action moves to a new part of the planet and the characters find themselves faced by new challenges that further blur the lines between artificial intelligence and humanity.
This season also sees the introduction of new characters including the Mithraic Decima, played by South African actress Kim Engelbrecht, and the outdated android Grandmother played by Selina Jones, who Father brings back to life. There are also new challenges facing the former atheist soldier turned self-anointed Mithraic prophet Marcus played by Travis Fimmel, and his estranged wife and newly self-trained doctor Sue played by Niamh Algar.
Algar said that when the cast arrived back in Cape Town last year for the second-season shoot, the first thing they did was tour the new sets. “Just seeing the vision of Aaron and his writing combined with the production design informed so much about the characters and the way we played things. You can’t help but learn so much about yourself when you're exposed to a production of this scale, but also about the workings of this big, wonderful machine of filmmaking.
"It's fun, it’s play and it reminds you why you, as an actor, do this job.” She was effusive about the beauty of Cape Town, which provided all the exterior locations for the show, joking that, “I’m Irish so a hill to me is a mountain but when you’re up in these mountains, it does feel like a new planet. The South African crew and cast were phenomenal. It was a perfect location for a show like this.”
Collins agreed and said that, “Each time we’ve been to a new location I've spent the weekend going back to walk on the beach and be like, 'This exists, this is real!'”
As to what twists and turns and answers to head-scratching questions this season has in store, Salim assures audiences that Aaron has a plan. “All the questions that we have will be answered. What’s great about the show and what he's done is that a lot of the questions you might have may have already been answered in scenes beforehand — you probably just missed them. The answers are there, you have to look for them.”
Guzikowski said this season is concerned with “power, especially as it relates to a creator and the power that creator has over its creations and also, perhaps more interestingly, the creations’ power over the creators. We deal with power dynamics in season two.”
As to whether he has all of the show’s planned five season arcs worked out as carefully as Salim believes, he said, “A lot of it’s worked out. If you think of it as a house, the framework is worked out but as you go inside the house, it’s not. As we create it, it starts talking back to us and we adjust to try and make the best show possible.
"There's a framework, a map, but it’s pretty zoomed out. The closer you zoom in, the more it becomes time to start improvising and figuring things out that you hadn't thought about before. I try and keep it flexible and mouldable but there's an overriding framework that won’t change.”
For Jones and Engelbrecht, being in a show that already has a firm following and a distinctive look and feel was daunting, but Engelbrecht said: “We were all given a full breakdown of what the story was and who the characters were and so we had enough ammunition to go into it and feel strong enough to tackle it. It’s on an epic scale with huge sets and everything is green-screen and there was Covid to deal with and we were testing three times a week but the story book is so intense that it was really exciting to get one's teeth into it.”
Jones admits that she’s not a sci-fi fan. “My favourite movie is Dream Girls,” she said, adding that when she watched the first season she thought, “Good God! What happens now? It takes you on an adventure. I really fell in love with it. Coming in, the cast and crew were absolutely wonderful and opened up their hearts to us.”
Guzikowski said he believes that audiences have responded to the show because it deals with humanity and a new planet. “You can extrapolate through the lens of living on Earth and exploring aspects of what we’re going through as a developed civilisation by looking at the beginnings of this other planet and seeing how things germinate, how conflicts and relationships give birth to things that become countries and religions.”
He said he hopes audiences will continue to respond to the show because, “We’re going right back to the beginning, trying to track that progression. That’s something everyone can relate to on some level because we’re all part of this grand experiment. There are 7-billion people on the planet — and it’s always interesting to see what would happen if you had the chance to do it all over again.”
• 'Raised by Wolves' Season Two is now on Showmax. New episodes are added weekly.
