Humans Series 2 Launch Q&A - Spoiler-free Version

The following is a partial transcript of the Question and Answer session led by Morgan Jeffery at the Humans series 2 press launch, Thursday 13th October.

The panel took place after a preview screening of episode 1 of the hit show's second series, so questions whose answers refer specifically to the events of that episode have been omitted. General questions and those pertaining to content in the trailers which have already been online are included.

Comments made by Tom Goodman-Hill which expand on the trailers, but no further than he already expanded in his recent NYCC interview, are also included. Comments made by Katherine Parkinson and Gemma Chan alluding to scenes from the second series which are not in episode 1 have been included.

A full transcript will be posted after the UK broadcast of episode 1, on Sunday 30th October.

Morgan Jeffery: Gemma, for you, and for Emily as well, how easy was it, snapping back into Synth mode for this second series? Were you a little bit rusty? Was there more Synth School required?

Gemma Chan: I was pretty rusty. On the first day back, our amazing choreographer, Dan O’Neill, got us to do the basics, and got us to run, do Synth running. I managed to pull every muscle in both legs. I was in agony for the rest of Synth bootcamp. Yeah, it was harder than expected.

Emily Berrington: Yeah, it was harder. But what was good is that we had some new Synths, so we were at least better than they were.

Morgan Jeffery: You were the best ones. That’s a good point, how easy or difficult was it to find new actors who could live up to the high standard that these guys had set with the first series?

Derek Wax: Well, we were blessed in the first series with the most incredible cast. We're incredibly grateful and appreciative for the solid dedication and talent of our series 1 cast, so we had a quite a big challenge. We have a wonderful casting director, Victor Jenkins, and we searched high and low to get the best people for those roles. I think we struck lucky with Sonya Cassidy, and with Carrie-Ann Moss, with Marshall Allman, and, I’m now going to forget a few people who I ought to mention... but for both finding new Synths and new human characters, we tried to be as thorough as we could, and get the best people.

Morgan Jeffery: Now, Katherine and Tom, what state is Joe and Laura’s marriage in in this second series? I notice you’re sat quite far apart, I hope that’s not a bad sign.

Tom Goodman-Hill: That says it all. Yeah, they’re in a bother, they’re struggling to piece things back together, hence the house move, to try and have a fresh start and see if they can repair their marriage. Or see if Joe can repair the marriage. And also they’re looking out for their children’s interests, that’s the main thing really. Mattie’s now at university, Toby’s at a new school, and Sophie is struggling with separation from Anita. And I think Joe’s position is that he feels that if he can be a good dad, and try and help the kids, then Laura might see that he’s still a good guy.

Katherine Parkinson: Laura cares about the kids too(!). I think what’s particularly interesting in this series is that Laura was sort of anti-Synth last series, and Joe was more pro-Synth, in that he slept with one…(!) And this series, it’s kind of, interestingly, then, it swaps, and Laura becomes sort of a champion of the Synths, or certainly Synthetics having rights, whereas Joe ends up wanting to move away from Synths, and find a community where he can be “Synth-free”. That’s hard to say… after a drink! And I think that was a surprise to me when I read it, and I think that was a really interesting direction to take them in, and it makes sense, because I think Laura’s quite ethically driven, because she’s maybe got some guilt, and so on, whereas Joe is…

Tom Goodman-Hill: Morally corrupt.

Katherine Parkinson: …is, you know, rightly looking out for his children and being protective, and I think that was an interesting way to sort of draw a relationship, and how people can maybe fall apart because they just have sort of different stances, and different beliefs in how they should best kind of…

Tom Goodman-Hill: (Trump voice) That makes me smart. I realise I could be very Trump here, to your Hilary. (Trump voice) And interrupt you.

Morgan Jeffery: And Tom and Katherine, how was it being without Gemma, at least as far as we know at the beginning of the series, and Gemma, how was it for you being down on the seaside with Sam Palladio?

Gemma Chan: I should say, I did pitch Sam and Jon that maybe Mia should have started a new life for herself in Barbados, but they didn’t go for it!

Morgan Jeffery: You were by the sea at least.

Gemma Chan: But Margate, no, it was lovely. I did miss you guys…a bit.

Tom Goodman-Hill: We missed you too, Gemma.

Gemma Chan: And Pixie! (waves to Pixie Davies) Yeah. No, it was great. Sam’s brilliant, as you can see, and it was nice to explore a new dynamic, a new relationship. I think it’s, you know…

Katherine Parkinson: I’d like to have been on the beach with Sam Palladio. (to Tom) No disrespect.

Morgan Jeffery: Gemma, you’ve been working on an exciting little project of your own, sort of Humans-related…What can you tell us about that?

Gemma Chan: Yeah, it’s a documentary. I got to meet some amazing people, people who are kind of the leading minds in AI and robotics, and talk to them, and then alongside that we had a team building as good a robot version of me as they could, and we try to pass the robot off as me! To see how far away we are from the world of the show, that was the idea.

Morgan Jeffery: And Emily, you met the Gemmabot. How was that?

Emily Berrington: It was great, it was…our faces kind of said it all. It was so creepy, to see something that was so like Gemma, but not Gemma. It was almost weirder than if it was, I don’t know, than if it was something far removed from a human. It was the fact that it was so close that was very strange. We were asking it questions, and it could somehow look up information and answer properly. We’d say, ‘What do you think of Will Tudor?’, and it would say ‘Will Tudor is a brilliant actor.’ It was so lovely…but it was weird.

Morgan Jeffery: Of course, the first series was based on Real Humans, the Swedish series, and then it diverted more and more from that as it went on, and this is pretty much wholly original. So how is it different, tackling this second series, compared to the first?

Sam Vincent: It was exciting. We always had the freedom to take the story in a certain direction, but we had this wonderful framework, a basis from the original series, written by Lars Lundstrom, who’s here tonight, I think. And he gave us absolute freedom to do what we wanted with it.  We started quite close, and then it just organically grows away. You make a small change, and that’s magnified further on down the path. So when it came to the second series, we knew it would be an even bigger departure, but lots of the themes that he continued to explore are sort of explored in ours, albeit in different ways. It’s exciting to be doing more of our own stuff, but it’s nice to have something to hold onto as well, every now and again.

(The following questions were from the audience):

Westworld aired last week, do you see it as a rival to Humans?

Sam Vincent: The Yule Brynner film? I don’t know why we’d be worried about that(!)

Derek Wax: Yeah, it shows that there’s a huge appetite for drama about something which feels totally pertinent to our lives now, the interaction with technology. Of course, it’s very different, it’s a theme park. I think what we have - and I’m not trying to say ours is any better - I think obviously what we have is a world which feels very grounded and real, and set in an almost mundane, suburban world on some level. We are dealing with the most domestic, intimate sort of issues, and we’re not trying to set it in a more, sort of sci-fi-ish world. I think that really remains the DNA of Humans. You know, there’s been thousands of movies, from Terminator, to Bladerunner, to Robocop, to…you know, hundreds and hundreds of movies have explored AI. It’s just an accident that Westworld should have aired in pretty much the same week. But I think because they all explore it in such different ways, you get very different angles and perspectives on the subject. And I hope that we’re so far removed from Westworld in terms of our focus on the grounded, mundane realities, as opposed to the huge theme park, that I think we are sufficiently different.

Gemma Chan: I watched the first couple of episodes, and I really loved it. And again, I think, the territory that their show explores and our show explores, these questions of who are we, what makes us human, these questions are so rich, and the answers are kind of infinite. I think there’s definitely room for more than one show in this area. I really enjoyed it.

Sam Vincent: Yeah, actually I…don’t need to say anything now, because I was going to say largely that. I welcome it, actually. I think this area is so at the forefront of the sort of public consciousness that there is room for two shows about it, and it’s really exciting to look at it and see the things they’ve done differently, and the conclusions that they’ve arrived at that are similar. But if there’s room for 256 shows about cops, there’s room for two about AI!

Gemma, where’s the robot now?

Gemma Chan: I don’t know where the robot is now…I think the robot belongs--

How do we know that’s you?

Gemma Chan: (laughs) I did worry that perhaps I was - it did occur to me midway through that maybe I was making my own replacement -  Series 3, I might be out of a job. No, I believe the robot belongs to Channel 4, so it’s somewhere in the Channel 4 building, I imagine.

If you could play a different character than the one that you actually play, who would you choose?

Tom Goodman-Hill: Sophie. Not even kidding.

Katherine Parkinson: Well I’m dying to - I spend a lot of time in my trailer on set practicing my Synth. All I’m gonna say is it’s better than any of the other Synths on the show. No, it’s actually very hard to be a Synth, but I would like to give it ago.

Morgan Jeffery: You’d like to go to Synth School just for fun.

Katherine Parkinson: I would.

Gemma Chan: I’d like to play Odi. Though I couldn’t do it better than Will Tudor.

Emily Berrington: I was going to say Odi as well! I’d like to just see what being a broken Synth is like for a little bit.

For the actors: did you have any challenging moments, any challenging scenes during filming?

Emily Berrington: It’s always challenging movement-wise, as a Synth, whenever you discover a new thing you have to achieve while still convincingly being a Synth. So I had some - you saw a tiny little bit in the trailer - some action stuff, that took quite a lot of effort and quite a long time. I did also have a stunt double, to be fair. But the stuff I had to do… you know, all it takes is you kick something, and your natural instinct as a human being is to sort of use your face as well. To be able to do all of that as if it’s no effort is really tough. So there’s kind of something like that every day, which is why we have to have Dan O’Neill there every day, keeping us in check.

Gemma Chan: My character does a lot of running in the second half of the series, and I just - I’m just so bad at it. Ivanno Jeremiah is the king of Synth running. I’m more like Phoebe-from-Friends running. And also, I can’t do the Synth run without laughing at myself, so at the end of each bit of running I would laugh, and they’d be like, ‘You can’t laugh at the end!’ So, that, yeah. That was always the most difficult thing for me!

I was just wondering if it’s changed your relationship with technology, do you sort of lean more towards it now, has it made you more fearful of it, or the same as it was before?

Tom Goodman-Hill: Well, I remember being asked in the first series if I wanted to have a Synth, I said yes…and now I categorically say no.

Katherine Parkinson: Whereas I said no, and I’d say yes.

Emily Berrington: I think I’ve been a bit more aware, this time - I’ve thought more about - because of Joe’s storyline - what it means to be replaced. And so I’ve been a bit more aware of things like self checkouts, and stuff like that. You sort of think, that was a job, and now it’s a machine. So I have become a bit more wary, I think.

Gemma Chan: (calmly) I think we’re sleepwalking into our own annihilation. That’s the conclusion that I came to after finishing doing the documentary. Having spoken to the experts, that’s apparently so. And we’re kind of…we don’t really mind! Yeah… But everything’s gonna be fiiiiine(!)

Having played Synths, I’d like to ask what human quality you now most appreciate.

Emily Berrington: I think…oh, that’s such a good question. I think there’s something very unsettling about things that can’t give you the natural responses that you get from a human. It’s so difficult when you’re playing a Synth, not to sort of nod along when someone’s talking to you, and go, ‘Mmmm,’ and show that you’re listening and hearing and receiving information. It’s very unsettling if someone does that to you. And some real people do that! They just sort of look at you for ages while you’re speaking, and I definitely really appreciate that quality that humans have, to show, constantly, even without saying anything, that they’re with you, and they’re processing something.

Being an avid fan, I always find that eight episodes, I’m just left wanting more. Is it difficult for you guys to kind of contain all the material you have? Do you wish you had a bit more to write?

Sam Vincent: You always start off staring at a blank page, going “Oh my God, what are we gonna do, what are we gonna put, what’s gonna happen?” and by the end, you’re like “How are we possibly gonna fit this all in?” You know, that’s the kind of journey that you go on. But we’ll do you a couple more episodes, no problem. These guys’ll do it. We’ve got the Gemma robot now, so we’ll do a couple more.

I just wanted to know when Synth School was actually opening in the UK.

(General wondering about where Dan O'Neill has disappeared to at this crucial juncture)

Derek Wax: I'll just say, as a rather indirect segue, but fantastic credit to Dan, and Synth School, and all the incredible work he did with the choreography. But we also had four amazing directors on this series, whose creative contribution was massive and substantial, and obviously because of the uniqueness of Synth School they don’t get quite the mentions that they deserve. So I just want to say thank you to Lewis Arnold, who directed the episode we’ve just seen - rather brilliantly, I thought - and episode 2, and then we have Mark Carl Tibbets(??*), who directed episode 3 and 4, Francesca Gregorini did 5 and 6, and Mark Grizell(??*), who’s here, did 7 and 8. It’s just very nice to feel that we’ve found directors who really found a way into making this world real, and bringing out the incredible qualities that our actors have, as well.

*Best guess from the recording. Apologies if I've just made up names here! I think you're both called Mark, at least...