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HBO used the season two finale of True Detective to debut the first footage of its highly anticipated Westworld remake.
The series is based on Michael Crichton‘s 1973 film and written by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. It stars Anthony Hopkins in his first series-regular role as an inventor who runs an adult amusement park populated by lifelike robots.
The drama hails from J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk‘s Warner Bros. Television-based Bad Robot Productions, with the duo exec producing alongside Jerry Weintraub, Nolan (who directed the pilot) and Joy. Kathy Lingg will co-EP and Athena Wickham is a producer on the drama. Susie Ekins is set as a co-producer. Westworld hails from Bad Robot, Jerry Weintraub Productions and Kilter Films.
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Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the show’s androids — played by castmembers including James Marsden, Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton — can be killed off and return with completely different personas, allowing actors to play many characters. That creative device, one top talent agent said, helped HBO attract a premier cast (which also includes Ed Harris and Jeffrey Wright). And unlike the actors on such anthology series as FX’s American Horror Story and HBO’s own True Detective, which reboot themselves every season, the cast of Westworld is signing multiyear deals.
The series, originally slated to debut in 2015, won’t premiere until the first half of 2016. The trailer’s on-air bow comes a few weeks after it was first unspooled at Comic-Con, during the panel for Nolan’s CBS drama Person of Interest and after which HBO released first-look images.
HBO wowed the press at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour with an extended trailer of the series.
“[With] the film … you were very invested in one particular group of humans that were enjoying the park and their experience with the robots. This is not that. This is very much told from the POV of the robots,” HBO programming president Michael Lombardo told reporters at TCA. “The corporate world’s as dimensionalized as the park. And I think the visitors to the park are really not the primary focus of our show at all. So again, without giving more than that away, I think all I can say is only one character that you saw in the clip is a visitor to the park. And yeah, it resembles the film in name and in spirit and but really is, I think, otherwise not much of a reference point.”
Watch the trailer, below.
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