It’s finally here! Season 4 Westworld will be returning to HBO after more than two years — and the show continues to be more of a mystery than ever.
During the explosive season 3 finale in 2020, viewers questioned Dolores’ (Evan Rachel Wood) fate on the show as well as William’s (Ed Harris) future after he was seemingly replaced by a version of the Man in Black.
The team behind Westworld is determined to raise the bar when approaching the new season. “One of the fun things about me for the show, when Lisa [Joy] and I were talking about it way back when, was the ability of this show to shift genres every season, and the invitation to do it,” creator Jonathan NolanTelled The Hollywood ReporterIn May 2020. “We felt we had an open invitation to play around, especially in this moment where TV is reinventing itself constantly, to have a show that reinvents itself season after season.”
Nolan also noted that the genre could change from season to season. “You have a Western, you have a samurai movie, you have war movies, you have science-fiction. There are all of the different versions of the future you have seen over the years in movies,” he added. “We get to play around with all of that, and make text of all of that. The idea that the next season will feel completely different from the previous seasons in terms of genre? Yes, that’s absolutely part of the structure of the show.”
Nolan stated that the entire world-building vision was in place since the beginning of the series. “When we were writing the pilot, we had this glorious period where we felt we needed to come up with a plan. The story laid itself out very neatly into chapters,” he shared. “We’ve been discussing it from the beginning. We’re giving everybody a bit of a break, and obviously it’s a crazy moment right now. We have been talking about [season 4] for a long time.”
Even though the creative team chose to stay quiet about the upcoming story lines, Nolan teased that it wasn’t necessarily the end of Wood’s time on the show. “We love Evan Rachel Wood. She’s a terrific, terrific actor. It was an amazing journey with the character. You do have to be careful in a show where these are robots, and death is a different deal,” he said, referring to Dolores’ death. “We’ve gotten a sense of what it would take to completely kill a host. These things are temporary so you need to be careful. But that character is gone. We love working with Evan.”
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