In just three episodes, Pandora Season 2 has taken a heavy toll on Dauntless Captain Xander Duvall. After losing an entire strike team and then his friend Matta, Xander must hold his crew together while they mourn. Now, in "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'," he will also have to face his own personal demons, as mysterious circumstances force him to confront his family in a strange dreamscape.
Speaking to CBR, Xander actor Oliver Dench weighed in on how the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic did -- and didn't -- change his experience filming Season 2. He teased how the show will explore Xander's dynamic with his family, as well as how his relationship with Jax will continue to evolve. He also shared his adventures dealing with CGI monsters, the day Ben Radcliffe got a concussion, what filming was like with a broken arm and more.
Let's start with some current events: how did COVID-19 change your experience on set for Season 2?
Well, for starters, it was pushed back massively. So obviously our air date changed, and there was lots of uncertainty and panic. I don't think any production really knew what to do. I don't think anyone in the whole world really knew what to do when COVID started, but much less anyone trying to get anything filmed, or really any business off the ground at all.
So I know that the producers' first port of call was to keep us safe. So a lot got delayed while they worked out exactly what safe meant in the face of COVID. Phil [Roth], one of our producers in Bulgaria, was meeting with the Minister of Health to try and make sure they had exemptions for getting people across from the US, because the US was having such a famously tough time with the pandemic, and still are.
But eventually, we all got over there, and there were rules in place, but everything went so smoothly. I'm actually blown away. There was a crew of about probably 100 people -- or maybe more -- in total, who were all getting tested once or twice a week, and through the whole time, no one got COVID, which I guess is a testament to, you know, everyone was wearing their masks; everyone was doing all the stuff they were meant to be doing. The testing was really good. The distancing was in place.
It also seems as though, in Bulgaria, there's a fairly low rate of COVID, it seems. They're also not doing that much testing, so I don't know! They could be, like, tricking everyone, bamboozling everything, but I think it's amazing and a testament to what the situation is there that so many people were tested every week for two and a half months, and no one caught it. So really, we're just phenomenally fortunate.
The truth is, I think once you get used to the measures, once you get used to wearing a mask, it's not so bad. Like, it's fine. If it's taken as a new normal, and you just get used to it, then really it didn't really affect my experience of the shoot at all. That's basically it.
At the end of last week's episode, we got a little preview that seemed to suggest we'll get to meet Xander's family, in a matter of speaking. What does that look like?
Well, in an episode in Season 1 was the first time we ever got a glimpse of Xander's family, not through the audience's eyes but through the incredible storytelling power of Oliver Dench, when he described his family in the prom episode, whichever episode that was. I believe I was slow dancing -- Xander was slow dancing with Jax and talking about his brother fighting in the war, and about how he used to want to be an architect and all those kind of things.
So we know a little bit about the dynamics between us, our family, but having them there on screen was fantastic, actually. It's always great and a bit of a gift for an actor when a writer or producer or director or whoever decides to delve in a bit deeper to what their character is feeling or thinking or where they come from, and it meant I got to work with Jesse, who plays my brother, Zion, who I imagine was seen for just a few seconds, who is a great actor from New Zealand, who looks surprisingly like me. So it was good fun.
There were a few good people around to help us with those family scenes. It was fun. I'm trying not to give too much away, but it's really exciting. I think something that Season 2 does better than Season 1 is we're able to, now that we're a little more invested in the characters, we can delve a bit deeper into their lives and their psyches. It's a bit more interesting, a bit less surface level and a bit more gritty. I think you get a really fun slice of that from Xander's family.
When we started out the season, Xander was really questioning whether or not he was fit to lead. How does he continue to struggle with that as the season continues?
He's a hero extraordinaire! Yeah, I think a lot of Xander's whole arc, through all of Pandora so far, has been dealing with imposter syndrome, that feeling of feeling out of place in what he's doing, I guess, maybe coming from his poorly planned switch of careers when his brother was killed, or anything else. He's been dealing with feeling out of place where he is and not feeling fully secure in his job.
The truth is, he loses a lot of people under his command. [laughs] You know, through the episodes we've seen so far, we've seen him lose an entire strike team. He's lost a whole ship before. There's a lot of responsibility placed on the shoulders for this guy who is effectively a young guy and maybe sometimes a little bit inept. Maybe decisions are difficult, maybe he does make tricky decisions, and maybe he does make mistakes, like I'm sure everyone does.
So through the series, he carries on dealing with not just his sense of confusion in his placement as a captain under EarthComm, which definitely comes to a head when he starts to think about whether orders are unquestionable, whether authority is always absolute, which I think is a great, great moral to be thinking about today, when often lots of our leadership is a bit questionable. He also starts thinking about how his moral compass relates to that of the people around him and how he should react in a crisis, which gets pretty exciting and fiery towards the end of this season, if I can remember.
Last week, the team lost Matta to the Ancients. How does that impact the team dynamic, and does that take a toll on Xander?
From Xander's point of view, it is the first real spin to them. The first three episodes, we get a real great glimpse on the crack team of this new EarthComm ship, and things are kind of going okay! Losing Matta is just the first of many losses of that team and things spiral out of control.
For Xander, it's this responsibility issue of losing people for whom he feels responsible, which I think is a massive weight on his own conscience, and then functionally for the team, obviously, poor old Ralen, who can't catch a break, has only just worked out his differences with his wife, for her to be absorbed by the Ancients, in a motel of all places. [laughs] So he has a tough time over the next few episodes. I think they're a little bit featured in that teaser, that he spends some confusing time maybe away from the rest of us, and suddenly Xander's team is splintering away.
Again, the questions are raised about whether he's right for this job, whether he is a captain that can keep his team together, whether someone else might just do it better, or maybe someone else wouldn't have got hurt if someone else were in charge. I think those identity questions are really present for Xander throughout the series as he battles with all these issues. And poor Matta! She's not there the whole time.
Xander and Jax really seem to be struggling with his decision to kill Evil Jax. How does their relationship continue to evolve?
Their relationship is tumultuous, to say the least. I think they suffer from situation -- again, similarly to the crew, the first three episodes show us a glimpse of what their life could be like, were it not for the extenuating circumstances. They love each other, clearly. They're also trying their best to be supportive of each other, but the situation that they're in, the pressure that Jax is under to be the sole voice in charge of judgment and control of the universe, and the similarly intense pressures Xander is under to be a captain of a ship just crushes, just puts their relationship in this absolute vise.
Where it's going to go? Again, not to delve into any kind of crazy spoilery territory, but I think they collide gloriously and beautifully, like a pair of asteroids and comets smashing against each other and whirling in their orbit, sometimes painfully and sometimes beautifully, and that's as much detail as I can go into about where the series is going to go in terms of their relationship. [laughs]
Aside from Jax, who would you say has the most interesting dynamic with Xander this season, and why?
Ralen. My guy! He's the best. Ralen, played by Ben Radcliffe. He's just exemplary. He's one of my best friends on set when we're shooting it, and something that's been really pleasant about this season -- the first season showed Xander and Ralen locked in this eternal battle of mistrust and miscommunication and racism, I guess, but Season 2 allows us to settle into the buddy cop thing.
We're friends and we trust each other and we support each other and we understand each other and our asteroids, rather than colliding tumultuously in general for this season, they orbit gently, like Pluto and Charon going round together, always supporting each other, pushing and pulling the weight with a deep sense of respect and love. That is an important relationship for Xander going forward, and it's an important relationship for Oliver Dench, as well.
Speaking of that, Xander and Ralen headed into the Ancients' cave network last week and found themselves facing this giant lizard creature, which was an entirely CGI creation. Tell me a little about what that battle looked like before the effects were added.
So it's a crazy thing to be shooting anything that has a lot of CGI. Fortunately, we were saved in that episode that is directed by Chris LeDoux, who is one of our producers and the visual effects producer. He runs Crafty Apes, the visual effects company that takes care of Pandora.
So it was great to have him for that episode specifically, because as you said, it was so visual effects-heavy, that we needed him there, like a desperate lifeline, to tell us what we were reacting to, because it can sometimes be difficult, especially when things can be under time pressures or still under design. It's quite difficult to imagine it, but he was able to sometimes show us pictures on his phone, and so he'd have everyone gathered around, going, "Okay, guys, this is that scary worm thing. This is what you're reacting to."
So we were, of course, in this cave set, just shooting blindly at the worm. Ben runs forward, picks up that rifle off the floor, and sends himself backwards -- does like a half-backflip -- and smacked his head on the floor. And it's the shot they used in the thing! It's so funny knowing it happened, because just after it happens, he pops himself back up and reaches for the back of his head and goes [gasp] and then gets up and runs out. I'm so glad they used that shot, because it was hilarious. He's fine! He's fine. He's happy, healthy. He went to bed early that night, but he woke up absolutely fine.
The rest of the CGI? I mean, it is hard. It is a real challenge to shoot things, like that halo jump where we're all jumping from the spaceship, going down. That is really tricky, and it effectively consists of all of us standing in front of the camera while they're extremely close up on our face, just screaming, screaming as loud as we can, with Chris being like, "Scream! You're falling!", which is really fun! It is really fun, but it is really difficult.
So it's nice to finally see the episode and see how it cuts together and things start to make sense. It's satisfying. But no, in that episode, we were blessed by Ben's massive commitment to stunts and Chris' presence as a director, to be able to tell us how it's all gonna fit together.
What's your favorite memory from filming Season 2?
Season 2 was all so wonderful, really. Season 1, we were still finding ourselves, working out how production worked, working out the kinks on set and the kinks in whatever else, the character things, this and that. Season 2, we went to it was such a certainty of what we were making, who our characters were, the crew. The vast majority of the crew was back, and that was glorious, being able to hang out with them and talk about it. It felt like a real team, like a family working together to make something. Also, we were so lucky to be working in the time of COVID that it just felt really, really special. The whole thing was such a positive experience.
I broke my arm! Not a favorite memory. Keep an eye out on episode seven onwards, because my arm is just hidden behind my back the whole time, because it's broken and it's in a cast and it's covered in a pair of tights so that you can't see it and then it kind of blends in with my skin. That wasn't a fond memory, but it did create lots of fond memories on set of us doing a scene and then them saying, "No, no. Go again! Hide your arm! Make it look cool. Make it do this." You know, fixing things so that they worked without it.
But, oh, what was fun? It was nice to have John Harlan Kim [who plays Greg Li]. It was great to have him back. He's a great addition to the cast. I also really liked, especially towards the beginning of the series, working with Priscilla a bit more. Our asteroids were slightly more peripheral in the first season, apart from towards the end. So it was nice to have a lot of proper time with her, sharing scenes.
Beyond that, you know, I like shooting laser guns. I like fighting aliens and shooting laser guns. That's always the highlight.
What do you hope fans take away from Season 2?
Someone should have coached me on this. [laughs] I think that Season 2, one of the big threads of the whole thing is about personal responsibility for pulling together and optimistically saving the universe, and I'm big into that. All about the universe. I'm there every day. I think that if there's one thing that fans can take from it, it is a sense of optimism about things that I think the show is always working for and instill a sense of optimistic responsibility that the universe does need saving right now and that the climate needs saving and all that stuff that everyone always talks about at the end of interviews, you know? It really matters.
There is this constant underscoring in Pandora of it being a human's -- or alien's -- responsibility to look out for the universe that we live in. I really think that's something that humanity needs to have now. And if not that, then maybe a sense of escapism and a sense of fun that is also maybe necessary, in what is currently quite a difficult world for us. And I hope they think I'm cool!
The CW's Pandora stars Priscilla Quintana as Jax, Oliver Dench as Xander Duvall, Ben Radcliffe as Ralen, Noah Huntley as Professor Donovan Osborn and Vikash Bhai as Professor Martin Shral. Season 2 airs Sundays at 8 pm ET/PT.