Attendees at New York Comic Con got a new trailer and four never-before-seen clips from Prime Video’s highly anticipated limited series Blade Runner 2099, starring Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer.
At the show’s panel on Saturday at NYCC‘s Empire Stage, Yeoh (Olwen) and Schafer (Cora) teased what to expect alongside co-stars Dimitri Abold, Lewis Gribben, and Matthew Needham; showrunner, creator, and executive producer Silka Luisa; and executive producers Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson.
During the panel, the cast and creatives spoke with reverence and admiration about the franchise’s previous installments: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049.
“I think it changed sci-fi as a genre,” Schafer said of the franchise.
Blade Runner 2099 is set after Blade Runner 2049, in a world where an uprising has occurred and replicants have surpassed humans as the dominant species.
“The creations have surpassed their creators,” Luisa said, adding that the series takes place at a “junction point, when one species and a new one is rising.”
With the replicants in power, Schafer’s on-the-run human Cora goes undercover as a Blade Runner with the LAPD, opposite Olwen, a replicant grappling with her own mortality. Yeoh expressed her enthusiasm for playing a replicant rather than a human and joked about trying to keep up with her frequent scene partner, Schafer. She also discussed the complexity of playing a character who goes from accepting her impending death to actively fighting it for reasons the show will reveal.
Johnson described the show as “Departed in the world of Blade Runner,” explaining that Cora and Olwen’s dynamic is at the heart of the story. Needham, who called his character a “junior partner” stuck in Olwen’s shadow, added that the show is a detective story with “a really exciting, beautiful mystery at the heart of it.”
The Blade Runner franchise is known for its visuals, and the Blade Runner 2099 showrunner said the show’s aesthetic drew inspiration from the premise.
“The show is really about a birth. It’s about the birth of a city, of a society, of our characters, and it’s really the dawn of this new era,” Luisa said. “And when I think of a birth, I think hot, sticky, bright, chaotic — and that’s where the environment came from.”
Four clips of the show were unveiled, touching on different character dynamics and storylines that will probably make a lot more sense once the show airs (like the significance of a Red Light District that sells human experiences to replicants who long for a life they can’t have).
The Blade Runner 2099 crew wrapped up their panel by debuting a new trailer for the sci-fi series. All eight episodes of Blade Runner 2099 will premiere on Prime Video on November 25.
This article was originally published onForbes.com
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