Alex Garland’s Next Project Won’t Be Sci-Fi, but He Wants His ‘Devs’ Cast to Star
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Alex Garland’s FX on Hulu series “Devs” has just launched on the new platform, with the first two episodes of the science-fiction miniseries now available to stream. The “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation” filmmaker, directing on the small screen for the first time, conjures a dystopian vision of the hubris of Silicon Valley, simmering with atmosphere and dread. According to a new interview with Collider, he’s already back at the drawing board for his next project, which he also envisions as another series — and with some of the same actors as “Devs.”
Garland said of his ensemble that he “thought that it would be an interesting thing to take what theater does, quite often, which is to have a company, and then you move around the parts within the company, and you can do a different play with the same actors, where someone who’s the lead in one is now a supporting actor. That’s a very interesting thing that theater does, and I think it could work in television, so I thought I’d try it.” “Devs” stars “Ex Machina” actress Sonoya Mizuno as a software engineer with dark suspicions about her boyfriend’s (Karl Glusman) employer, the cutting-edge tech company Amaya, after he’s murdered. Amaya is run by the mysterious Forest, played by an against-type Nick Offerman, and Katie (a stone-faced Alison Pill).
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Garland said his next series, unlike his body of films and “Devs,” won’t be in sci-fi territory. “I’ve written the first episode, and I’m working on the second episode. I have no idea whether FX will want to make it, and I don’t know if the cast will want to do the parts I’ve written for them, so it’s all completely speculative,” he said. “It’s really about civil disobedience. It’s not science fiction. It’s essentially apolitical. I don’t know if I’ve come up with this idea because of this cast. It’s chicken and egg.”
Garland also assured that the eight episodes of “Devs,” which will roll out over the next few weeks, are the end of the story. “At the moment, I don’t know how to do an open-ended story. I think I probably prefer stories that end, I guess. Maybe it’s just as simple as that. The idea of reaching the end of Episode 8 and not concluding the story, to me, personally, would be very frustrating,” he told Collider.
Read IndieWire’s recent interview with Garland about “Devs” here.
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