Fans looking forward to the second season of the BBC/HBO’s His Dark Materials got a few glimpses of what to expect when the show returns this coming fall. During the show’s panel yesterday at Comic-Con@Home, the first trailer for the second season was premiered along with one new cast member revealing the participation of another, previously unannounced actor.
The trailer can be seen below.
During the cast discussion of how they were looking forward to fans of the show seeing the second season when it premiers later this year on the BBC and HBO, second season newcomer Andrew Scott revealed that his character’s deamon – an animalistic avatar of each person’s soul in the show’s universe – was going to be voiced by an actor “who is very closet to me in real life, a young performer and writer named Phoebe Waller-Bridge.”
It was an announcement that seemed to have caught the rest of the cast off guard, as they broke into cheers. Scott and the much-in-demand Waller-Bridge appeared together recently in the second season of the latter’s hit series Fleabag.
Scott’s revelation comes on the heels of a report from Deadline published shortly before the panel premiered that Terence Stamp, Jade Anouka and Simone Kirby have also joined the show’s second season cast.
During the panel, executive producer Jane Trantor took the opportunity to address the fact that the show was in production when coronavirus lockdowns went into effect and how that could impact the upcoming season.
The good news is we have managed to keep going the whole way through the lockdown. We have an amazing post-production team and are – touch wood- currently on course for transmitting when we would have transmitted.
We had an incredible piece of luck. We were filming when the pandemic hit and we did have to stop filming filming. But we were in a peculiar situation where our main unit had wrapped just before Christmas 2019 and we had a stand alone episode that we were filming in March and it was separate from the other seven episodes. It was a stand alone episode which Jack [Thorne, executive producer and writer] had written with the blessing and input of Philip Pullman which looked at what Asrial had been doing between going through the anomaly at the end of season one and when we see Lord Asriel at the beginning of Book 3, The Amber Spyglass.
Asrial isn’t actually in The Subtle Knife, he’s very much talked about, his presence is very much felt, but he’s not actually there. So we kind of played detective with The Subtle Knife and figured out what he might be doing. For us, it meant that we could continue post-production on the seven episodes that make up The Subtle Knife and just put the Asrial stand alone episode to the side and maybe at some point in the future revisit it as a stand alone. But essentially, our adaptation of The Subtle Knife had been completed. So we were really lucky.
The second season of His Dark Materials is set for airing later this fall on the BBC and HBO.
