Silo Creator Hugh Howey On Season 1 And The Upcoming Season 2 (Apple+)

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore. I'm a producer, writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watch something good, I talk about it on this show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watched this tonight. There's always something good to watch. Let's get started, all right. Today on the show, I am incredibly honored to welcome in writer Hugh Howie, who created the world of Silo. His series of books are the basis of the Apple Plus series that just had its season finale on Friday. To thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks for having me that So first off, obviously we are going to talk about season one of Silo.

0:44 So if you're listening to this and you have not yet caught up with the show, leave come back when you're caught up. Yeah, there can be a lot of spoilers, and I even have to give you like a spoiler warning for me because I've only I've only seen the first season. I have not read the books. I've had a discussion with a friend actually this weekend I was like all right, which books can I read, because I'm definitely gonna go read them now, and I'm going to ask you later what I can read without spoiling it for myself. But all I've seen is the season one of the show, and I wanted to start with the foundation of the concept. So I thought that was so impressive to me and got me in immediately. Was from a writing perspective, the cleverness of the setup that they don't know their own history. They're in this silo underground. They have this viewing window, so it's like it doesn't feel like anything's being hidden from them.

1:37 Any request to leave is granted, so you're not being kept prisoner. The cleaning. It's very airtight in a way that I think often high concept sci fi of this sort is not airtight like that, meaning that often there would be a contrivance or it's sort of like you gotta take it just because the story says so that people would go along with this. But I felt like the design of it I totally bought, Like if I was there, I'd probably be like, yeah, sure, it makes sense, Like I totally bought it, And I think that's a real accomplishment and it's sort of the foundation of the whole thing. Thanks, m Yeah, it's what happens when you try to base your fictional and reality. There's enough you know, dystopian stuff about the way we live and bizarre, like humans are just strange, and leaning into that with your fiction, you know, can send you some really fun, fun directions. I had a few things in mind when I first came up with the idea. You know, I've always loved that Plato's allegory of the cave, just the idea that we don't see the true shape of things, we see their shadows and try to infer reality based on a very limited viewpoint. I think that's becoming more and more true. And the idea that we get most of our information about the world through our screens, you know, like you and I are doing it right now, and we get we get all of our news and our a lot of our more of our social light through our screens, which is kind of weird, and

3:08 I think that has a psychological effect on people. And you know, this is twelve years ago that I wrote the original story. But people focus on the silo a lot as a as a device in the story. But to me, the silo is just a place to put people where they only had this one wall screen, this one view of the world, And that to me was like the interesting question, like what is that? What does it do to our belief and in reality when we can't trust the things that we see and you know, we didn't have like deep fakes and generative AI and stuff like that when the story has written, so it's really even I think more Germane now than it was back and it's in its original publishing. There's some psychological experiment I think it's called like the visual cliff or something, where it's basically an experiment of there's a boundary that is psychologically presented to the subject, but it's not a real boundary. It's not a physical boundary. It's purely psychological, but they will treat it as a real boundary essentially that we can it's like a learned helplessness thing. So there's a lot of this stuff that is certainly validated by like psychology of human beings. It was interesting I was reading up about you and I noticed that there's some I think it's on Wikipedia where it talks about you took a catamaran from Cape Town to Australia.

4:38 And then I noticed that, you know, Silo obviously is about a group of people that are isolated. And then your other property that I think is also becoming a TV show, Beaking twenty three, is about a lighthouse in space. And it's interesting, is that something that you've consciously registered that you've written a bunch of stuff about people that are isolated. Yeah, not just isolation, but a lot of nautical themed writing. You know, my first my first series of books was basically as a space oper was based on my sailing around between islands when I was in my twenties on a little sailboat. Every country, all these island countries were just like different planets, and that formed the inspiration for my first series of books. And you know, the Shell Collector kind of is a homage to my love of the sea. So yeah, my my sailings informed my writing, and my writing is certainly informed my sailing as well. Yeah, so it was interesting you read you wrote a blog post recently talking about your year and and sort of things, which was beautifully written by last thing just people read it, But in that you sort of allude to something that you know, anybody who works in the industry knows, which is that if you are fortunate enough to have something made, chances are it's not going to be good. Like the more likely outcome is that it would be bad. And it seemed for meeting your blog post that you were fully aware of that and and sort of you had prepared yourself that

6:11 like, this is probably not go like the odds are not in my favor that it's going to turn out great. Um, So can you talk about like that process of preparing yourself for that, you know, it's it's probably a better way to defend your heart, really and then actually finding out that it's good, and what a pleasant surprise. It's just you know, being realistic. If you open up rotten Tomatoes on any given day or I am to be or wherever you wherever you get your your you know, collated your average reviews um. More than half the things on the page are below average. Um, it's hard to do something that's even decent um. Good is really difficult, and great is you know, unexpected, And you can't tell when you're making something where what category you're going to end up in, Like being on set does it clue you in watching dailies doesn't tell you, and it could even be something that you like or I'm proud of, but the critics and the audience will disagree with you. So you know, every every year, there's only like two or three things that really break out and become get some kind of word of mouth or hype. And I feel like almost every creator put something out there thinking this will be the thing that goes gangbusters, And that's so wild that we're that like misguided on I think you should have all the love and passion for your art as you can, but to

7:44 expect the world to embrace it madly is insane. It just ignores, you know, our own experiences as consumers of art. So I went into you know, I go into every bit of art creation and thinking about the consumer side and how unlikely it is to do something that that's a hit. So when it happened for me, which is you know what happened with Silo, like it was the breakout thing of the summer, there's nothing else that's really getting the chatter, and that's just like you, I'd never allow myself to even dream of that. Um, it's the top drama Apple has ever had.

8:24 All these different places that use online metrics to measure excitement had it as like the number one show and all the streaming, and then some companies that have like fifteen million plus users where they could actually like Nielsen track what they're watching, found it to be the number one show and streaming. That was never part of my fantasy for this show. I was just hoping I wouldn't upset diehard fans. So I'm over the moon. It's like what we what we pulled off, is pretty much impossible, and we pulled it off anyway. Yeah, I was reading I think it was an interview with Rebecca Ferguson and she was talking about the staircase, I believe, and I was I was trying to imagine for you. You know, you have this in your brain for twelve years. They make the show, You go to the set and then there's this giant like how big is the staircase? Like are you?

9:20 Are you walking in that? And you feel like you've like stepped into your own brain, Like what is that experience like to see that? It's it's mind blowing. The thing. It dwarfs you. I mean, it's like you're in a football sized warehouse that's four stories high and the entire building. It's you know, it's one of the biggest buildings you could walk into, and the entire thing is full of a single set. And I've been on other sets since I seemed amazing things getting built, and I've never seen anything like this. And most of the people working on the show, even some Game of Thrones civets and people who've been on other massive scale projects, had never seen anything quite like this. Wow. And then you do a cameo on the final episode, and I was really curious about this. So I have been on multiple sets of stuff that I've written, and as the writer, you show up and you're like, oh, cool, they did the whatever this thing that I wrote. And for the first hour it's really cool, but after about an hour, you kind of feel like you're you're like a vestigial presence, like there's really nothing for you to do, really, and you're just kind of sitting around and you know, they're like setting up stuff. And then they do a take and they do like ten takes of the same bit of dialogue and you sort of you start to realize, God, am I bored? And that's been That's been my experience, which is very counterintuitive. I think, I'm so curious if because your your show is so much more visually spectacular, but was it still a little bit of

10:52 that. I've not been bored on set yet, but I've only spent maybe twelve or fifteen days on the set of Sila. I think it'll take a lot more. Before I was like, yeah, I'd rather be doing something else. You know, I've read the scripts so many times that any any scene that we shoot, like, I know why that seems important in what else happening and how it's connected, and I want to see the best version of it. So even the eighth and ninth take, I'm leaning into the monitor with everyone else, just trying to figure out how the framing can be a little bit better and if we got everything we needed. Yeah, but yeah, being an extra of course, that day flew by. I was that was like a twelve hour day and it felt like a blink of an eye because I was just having so much fun. That's great. Um, I'm curious. So there was a bunch of like a boarded version of this that almost got made, right, I think it was maybe gonna be a film at one point. I'm just curious. Now it seems like obviously worked out for the best, But I was wondering if you could touch on just briefly, like the Roads Not Taken, Like what what was the alternate versions of this that could have existed in film and television? Originally this landed with um Ridley Scott and Steve's Alien People don't. Steve doesn't have the name recognition he deserves, but he's probably the top script doctor screenwriter in Hollywood. He's just an absolute genius and he and a lot of what Ridley has done in

12:26 his career has been because of his partnership with Steve at times. So it was the two of them in twentyth century Fox, which is like, this is like the sci fi trifecta if you can get something made with those three parties, and so the the alternate reality of this is probably something like The Martian. You know, if it had gone well like The Martian did, it would have been a lot of people would have seen it. If he said Silo like, hey, yeah, I remember that I was in a theater. I didn't catch it, but I would have had a bump in book sales. I don't know, if you know, it would have been a trilogy. Martian was only one book, so maybe we would have gotten three films. So I can imagine what that alternate reality is like, But I don't think it would be nearly as much fun as what we're getting to do now, because this is going to be three or four years of looking forward to new seasons and you know, something constantly filming, Like, there's just a lot of activity and a lot of entertainment for me personally out of doing it this way, I want to share with you sort of my experience, and maybe this is a standard for the listeners who've also watched the show.

13:46 I was so impressed with how much is in that first episode. I think a lot of times shows like this, where there's a really, you know, compelling central mystery, they're content to just establish it in the first episode and then kind of coast a bit. And I thought that silo the first episode goes, so there's so much that happens in that first episode. It doesn't feel like it's it feels so packed in. You feel like you've you've what would be on a lesser show the first four or five episodes. That amount of plot feels covered in the first episode. And then I thought, that's kind of the same thing about the finale, like there was again a lesser version of this. You could have ended it a couple times earlier.

14:26 There's a couple big moments in that finale where if you wanted to, you could have strung it out a bit more. And so there's just a very clear sense of there's a lot of runway on the road, that this is not a situation where there's a limited amount of plot. If anything, it feels like we have an abundance, that there's so much to get through. I think that the first and the last episode I was just incredibly impressed by, And I don't know, I mean, I guess it's maybe it's a natural place to transition to the question that I have as a fan, which is what is covered in the show, Like what can I read that will not spoil season two for me? So, the original and the novel Wool is five separate publications that were sandwiched into one book. It was serialized.

15:22 The reason there's so much in that pilot that first episode is that's the first book. It was about fifty six pages, and to turn a fifty six page novel into a fifty six page script is a huge task. We also, you know, Juliet doesn't appear in the book until like the third part of the book, so you read, you know, one hundred and twenty pages or something before you get Juliette in the novel. So that's one of the reasons that the material is so dense. If you read, you could read the first like forty of the novel and still be in season one, and it's a very clear stopping point. There's like five parts of the novel you could still see the DNA like the original bones of the certilization, and the first three books basically are what we just showed in season one, and then books four and five, which are longer. Even this only two.

16:26 It's about sixty percent of the novel that will be season two, got it. It seems like almost half the novel. Yeah, it seems like Apple supported you tremendously. Because I'm just thinking from a creative executive perspective. You know, you have Rebecca Ferguson. The Juliet character clearly is driving the narrative. But the you know, I think that the lazier note might have been, let's just start with her and simplify it. She's the lead let's get her in, you know, and instead they're like, no, not not only are we not going to start with her, We're gonna get David Loo, We're gonna get Rashida Jones. We're gonna totally blow out the beginning of this, which is kind of a different group of characters. Get people invested in that, and then switch perspective, which is, you know, a pretty that could be a scary thing when you're putting it together, you could worry that always. The audience kind of get invested in these characters and then they go away. Now I'll get to get invested in a new character.

17:22 And it seems like they totally steered into that and got, you like, the best actors and really committed to that approach. Yeah, I don't know if we couldn't have locked down David or Rashida for you know, multiple seasons. So having a natural structure that made these characters temporary actually let us you know, punch above our weight when we went casting for those parts, and it all, you know, for me, it just ups the stakes. Like I don't know that people who aren't familiar with the book must think Juliet's days are numbered throughout the season because we put in some tough situations and we haven't shied away. So I just you know, it's George is dead, um, John's and Marn's book die Like you know, there's a there's the body to really pile up in the show. There's a part when she jumps off the staircase and it's used as a as a I think it's either an act out or an episode out. And to your point, because I hadn't read the books, I'm like, maybe she does she just die?

18:26 Like is that yeah? And does she this season two open up with her dying and we introduce a new star, Like, you know, I don't want people to feel like her plot armor is um is you know too thick. She does exhibit some plot armor in the season, but like that's um It's hard to make an action pack show that doesn't have a little bit of that. Yeah. I want to share with you a thought that crossed my mind watching the show, and I think it speaks to why the show is so appealing to people, and particularly the first sason, which obviously then you have to find a different angle for the second season. The first season you're just wondering, wondering, wondering. You're like, you know that obviously whatever the people have been told is not true, so you're thinking, well, what could it be? What could it be? And then at one point there's mention of a massive door at the bottom of the silo, and this thought like raised into my mind. I'm like, what if it's not a silo, what if it's a skyscraper, and what if the door is at ground level? And the fact that I could even think that in the same theory and be like that could be true speaks to the fun of it, because it's like, what could it be? Like, you're so curious.

19:33 It's such a tantalizing mystery, and I think that the fact that you the way that you landed it is very satisfying is a very difficult task. I mean, as any writer would say, like, if you set something up where the mystery is such a big part of it, how you're going to pay it off so that the audience feels satisfied without it being obvious is a very difficult balancing act. Yeah, I mean, we're lucky that this was kind of already tested the audiences with the book. My favorite theory is people who wondered if maybe they're on a spaceship, Like if you were doing a colony ship. I think people would go crazy if they knew they're an outer space. But if they thought they were on Earth still maybe they would, you know, maybe go half as crazy. And I thought that was a Coult theory. Yeah, it's it goes back to Plato's allegory of the cave, like if you have a very limited keyhole through which you see the world, then what's out there? It could be a lot, you know, a lot more, And but you know what's fun is just everyone assuming.

20:44 It's probably like getting in the mindset of the characters, like maybe it's better out there than people say, you know, I don't want to leave, and then when you finally get to see out there, you're like, oh, hold on a second. Maybe you know, the folks saying you better stay here are the ones who who have it right. And I think what's great is like, even as you go through the books, you can start second guessing yourself over and over again. What's great about it as an ending is it's a subversion of our expectations extremely cleverly. Because the expectation is they're line it's beautiful outside they're keeping them in here for reasons unknown, but once she gets out there, she's gonna see it's beautiful. This was all a lie. That would kind of be the obvious way to go, And obviously you set it up like that because we see images of it being nice outside and then the turn at the end to see it so dystopian. It makes you it's like, man, maybe Tim Robbins was onto something here, which I love because again it's such a subversion. You totally expect the whole way through that he's just, you know, bad guy and that's what it is.

21:51 And he even has what I think is probably his best scene in the whole piece in the last episode he started Ferguson in the cell and he has a moment of vulnerability where he's sort of like, do you think I'm like super jazzed to like be in this position and doing this? Like yeah, I love that he admits, like I don't enjoy this, like I'd rather be doing something else. But if I don't do this, everyone dies, And I think, you know, you can be you can be right and still be a bad guy. Like let's say let's say he's right that if he didn't do this, everyone would die. I think Juliet's question question would be, but is there a better way to do it? Like, is there a way to do it where there's less suffering and where people know the truth? Yeah, I like you have that little faith in humanity that we can't all be in on it and decide to make the rational choice like, and I think that is a that's a much better dynamic than like, I'm going to do bad things to you, because I get enjoyment out of it.

22:55 You could decide who to pull for, you know. I Yeah, I love going to Constant and seeing the fandoms that's spread across the universe, and that what I mean by that is people dressed up like Stormtroopers and Darth Vader because they're like I think, you know, these rebels are like causing trouble that people need order. Or there's people dressed up like cleanons and there they value their like warrior ethic and they think that the humans are like kind of you know, meddling and messing things up all the time, and it's rare to get that. You know, if you just have much stess twirling bad guys, then you don't have people who are who empathize with and have these characters resonate with them the sort of like mad genius cleverness of it is, and correct me if I have all the straight, because it's entirely possible I'd misunderstance thing. But so basically, the idea is that someone is sent out to clean. The image that is shown to them looks beautifull. Therefore they are motivated to do the cleaning to show the people what it is.

24:06 But the people don't see what they see and then and then their suit is such that it's not like basically they I guess there's a hole in the suit or something, and that's why they die. And in Juliette's case, it's been patched with the right patch and that's why she's able to survive. Is that do I have all that straight? Yeah? Exactly. And you know the people who go out to clean, if they're of the mindset like I'm keeping all this to myself, screw these people. Then they'll also clean because they want to act subserve it. They're like, Okay, just do what you're told. Let them think they beat you. And meanwhile, like, screw those guys, Like I'm gonna go over the hill and find all the other people and we're we're in on it, and these people aren't like, see you losers. And if you have a more magnanimous mindset, you're going to go out there and say, I know they won't see it as beautifully as I'm seeing it, but man, I want to give them the best view of this possible. So wherever you are on that spectrum, and then in the middle of that spectrum is a kind of like numb apathy where you just go along and you have television, you're like you realize you're about to die, or you're so in awe of what you're seeing that you just go into cruise control. What nobody does in that situation, and that this is what the world. This is kind of the whole plots predicated on this.

25:32 No one goes out there sees that in the mindset of I've been sent out to die or find out if my fantasy is accurate, and then I'm gonna just not do it, and that Juliet not cleaning is unprecedented, and that's what freaks out Bernard and makes them run off. It's it's such an interesting like psychological mousetrap that you've built, and it really does make you think and you kind of have to like keep puzzling over it, which is something that I always love. Um this device of at the end where there's a there's a great movie called The Invitation. I don't know if you've ever seen it. Um, I'm going to spoil it for your feet, don't mind, Yeah, please relevant here. So in The Invitation, we were in la and we go to this house. It's like a dinner party, and over the course of the dinner party, you realize that it's they're trying to ingratiate people into a death cult. That's the purpose of the dinner party. They've got these new people that they're trying to compel to join this death cult.

26:32 And it's very freaky, like a suicide it's like a suicide cult basically. Yeah, And so it's you think, wow, this is a very strange situation. And it all takes place in the house and then at the end they go to like the balcony and they light like a red light or something, and then you sort of pan out to like the hills and you see like dozens of red lights and you're like, holy shit, like you know, and so I think that as a device, as a narrative device, this notion of we're going to spend so much time in this confined such scenario and then we're going to pull out and show you that this is a tiny speck of a much bigger thing. I feel like that always works. I can't think of a time where that has been done where I've not been like super satisfied by it. And I think the end of season one and this shows another great example that it's it's so good because you know, I won't spoil you with how many there are, but you can see that there's like, you know, more than a dozen or so right there. Everything that just happened in season one is just a small subset of what's happening in that silo. There's so many lives being lived there, but people that are people being stopped to clean their people in judicial and it who are killing people and manipulating people and drugging people. There's all the drama that Alison and Holstein went through with having kids, and we know that's all bunch of nonsense as well.

27:52 And in each one of those other little indentions in the earth, like similar stories were happening, And I think that's what's so heartbreaking about it is you're like, Okay, if there's there's conflicts happening, if these people can just resolve that, maybe things will be okay, and then you zoom out and you're like, oh god, there's conflict everywhere. There's people suffering. There's so many people trapped, you know, like and who who Like who do this to these people? And then you're like, who do this to all these people? Yes? And then you realize the scale whoever's behind this you never built this thing. The scale of what they did is way more absurd than what you thought. When you're just in that one side would all that. I think it's subconsciously all that hits you when when you pan out right, it just hits you. In that three second image, you're thinking all that stuff that you just said. So it's like your brain sort of breaks. I'm curious about as you go into season two, because it does.

28:48 You would think in theory, it's almost like you have to change not the genre, but kind of the genre because it's no longer like the big mystery of what is you know what's out there? Now we know what's out there So is it more of like now the mystery is what's in the other ones, so it's still a mystery show or does it kind of change a bit and it's not really a mystery show anymore. It's sort of about different things. The mechanics of it are a bit different. What's what's amazing is that the level of mystery just goes way up after this and the people asking the questions, what the questions are asking, and the people who are asking it are way more interesting, and so the stakes are so much higher.

29:34 Like I don't know if you could tell when Bernard hurt about the door at the bottom of Silo, he had never heard of this before. You know, I think he conveys it really well in his face and he's like, what are you talking about? So there are things that he doesn't know and that you know, that's where we get to start playing in season two of like Who's the Puppet? The guy playing with the puppet also has strings on and Bernard is starting to notice those strings. Oh my god, what's what's really going on here? So yeah, it's still a mystery show, but also the action is so much more intense, the stakes are higher. Things really get out of control, all because of what Juliet did, which goes back to what Alison did, which you know it feeds into George and Holston and so many other people that we think aren't around long, but the influence that they had and the ripple effect of their decisions are here for quite a while. Rebecca Ferguson was very supportive of you in an interview, and essentially what she said, if I remember correctly, was she read the source material, then she read the scripts, and she passed and she said, I don't want to do it because I don't think essentially, I don't think it's as good as the book. And then they took her notes, rewrote it.

31:02 She couldn't let go of it. She was still thinking about it. So she was like, did they cast anybody yet? And I'm like no, She's like, all right, well fine. And then even in the same interview she was very candid. She was just like, season two is like way even though this is really good, season two is like way better, Like she was. She clearly expressed a lot of excitement for where she was going in season two. So I have noticed that, and I've talked to other writers and creators about this before. If the lead person is like really defensive of the source material, whether that's an original spec script, whether it's a book, whatever it might be, that seems like a really good sign for the show to be successful or movie. I interviewed actually the guys who wrote Sharper, which is an Apple Plus film, which is an incredibly dense narrative and very complex and has a lot of interesting things that it does, and they were like, the reason this movie is good is because Julianne Moore backed us from minute one. She was like, I like their script, We're doing their script. Same thing. I interviewed Trunk, who wrote The Equalizer with Denzel, and he was like, the reason that it's good, it's because Denzel every time they wanted to change something, he was like, wait, wait, why do we change it from Richard's original script?

32:08 So how much how meaningful was it her support and what ended up you know, becoming the product at the end, it was huge UM and Graham was the same way. Graham fell in love with the source material. He's he's been interested in this even before Apple got it back when Sony was you know, competing with UM with Ridley for this UM. So he was attached to the source material. Jamie Rlick that at Apple is a huge like he's obsessed with the books and that's why it's at you know, landed at Apple because of his um, his efforts um so and and then Morton became obsessed with the shi with the world, and a lot of the detail and the quality comes from Morton um saying like, no compromise, We're doing it this way and fighting for things like um like the guys we got for sound and things like that that you know, Apple was like we can't, can't do it has to be the UK and was like, nope, my guys on Iceland, We're going to do it this way. And I all these people were fighting all in the same direction. They weren't fighting each other, They're all fighting the friction that it takes to make great content. The other thing Rebecca did is she brought a level of professionalism and just niceness onto set that trickled down everywhere. Like when you're number one on the call sheet, is the

33:39 nicest person in the room. No one can be a baby, No one can you know, treat others with disrespect. She knew, you know, the crew, she chatted up everybody in between takes. She was, you know, the first one to throw her arms around you when the day started, like she said, an example that everyone had to live up to. And you know, it's a huge gift to us to get her when we did, because we probably can't get her now, like her star was just on the rise when we landed her. But I also appreciate just because of the relationship that we formed that like we gave her a gift as well, Like there are very few roles like this for female actors. She's a star, but she's always a co star. She doesn't get to like, you know, headlines something, be an executive producer, have creative input. So it's one of those things where like we gave each other a gift, which is this show where she's giving us years of her peak and we're giving her a huge vehicle for her to show off her chops. And boy, there's nothing better than like everyone winning. And that's how it's felt with this show, Like everyone's winning. The fans of the books are winning, fans of good TV, Apple, the publishers who believed in the you know, the

35:12 silver forty publishers around the world who have been waiting for some adaptation and price that into their initial offers. So it's just like there's no there's no bad version of this right now. It's just all good from everybody's perspective. It's interesting that Ridley Scott twenty Century Fox Legacy because when when Juliette is first introduced the way that Rebecca appears, so she comes out of the furnace or whatever, you know, the reactor thing, she's totally like she's Sigourney Weaver, an alien, like she's she's Ripley for sure. She just has this And it was the same you know when she first shows up and I think it's Mission possible, rog nation. I want to say, um, she was noticeable, Like you know, there's been a lot of great actors in those films, but she was the first person honestly, like you, Philip semore often as the bad guy, but like where you're like, this person has the charisma everything. Like if she was the lead, if Tom Cruise ever decides to like maybe take a break, like and she wants to lead one of these movies, she could totally do it. She's really like a very rare that level of charisma as a performer is very rare, and I think she would have been a star at any other age. She could have been in Casablanca episode every Bogart like. She just has a timeless star quality to her that you know is unusual. Yeah, it's very unusual. And also to have the physicality and also the emotional nuance. I wish, I wish we could talk about season two stuff, and I hope that they release some behind the scenes. What she's pulling off physically in season two is way more

36:47 impressive than Tom driving a motorcycle off a cliff, like a stunt that you and I could prep for in a weekend and pull off. It's basically parachuting. Um, I don't know how she's doing what she's doing in season two, and you'll you'll you'll get it when you see it and you realize this is all practical and it's not special effects, and it is her. But she's gonna get a war nominations for if she doesn't get it for this season, she'll get it for next season. To deserve every bit of it. It's insane. She's she's a super rare talent. We're very lucky to have her. My last question before we wrap up. Can I read the graphic novel without spoiling season two for myself? Half of it? Okay? I don't, And I don't think you know. I'm dying to see season two and I know the story intimately, so I don't think you can spoil.

37:45 There's a lot of people reading the novels right now, and I think they're going to enjoy it, just like fans of the books have enjoyed the first season. And it's similar to me, Like I'm the kind of person that can rewatch a movie because I just want to spend time in that world with those people, Like I can watch Back to the Future right now and love every scene, and knowing what happens does it detract from that for some for some reason. So I don't think you can. I don't think you can ruin season two by reading reading ahead. And when is season two projected to start release? I haven't heard a release date, but just looking at you know they're not going to want to delay it. Like you really have to be careful with your launch window on a first season because you don't want to you know, you want as much empty space as possible. But now, whenever you release the second season, you're gonna have a lot of hype.

38:39 It's gonna it markets itself. Now. We wrapped season one in June of last year, and here we are, you know, in July, and the season's over some I'm hoping less than a year from now, Like it'd be great if they released it around the same time. I love that kind of consistency. Yeah cool man, Well that is uh yeah, I don't want to take more of your time. I so appreciate you coming on. It's been such a pleasure to watch the show, and I'm very excited to now go read the books for me, honestly, Like that's I think it's what's cool about it is it's like you get just enough from the show where you're like, I would love to you know, I want to read five pages about like the guy whose shop is down there on the corner of the street, Like I want to really get into the world. So I'm really excited to dig into the books. And I thank you very much for coming on. Thanks man. It's fun to talk to someone who has such a high level of knowledge of the craft, so you get to have different a different conversation. So this is a blastroom. I really appreciate it. Man, thank you so much for listening. Also to the audience. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe future episodes. That is a show for today until next time. Bye bye,