‘Carnival Row’: Creator & Cast Address Production Challenges – “Reshoots Were A Gift” – TCA
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The creator and cast behind Amazon’s forthcoming big-budget fantasy drama Carnival Row defended the fact that the show went through a number of reshoots.
Orlando Bloom, who stars as human detective Rycroft Philostrate in the eight-part drama alongside refugee faerie Vignette Stonemoss Cara Delevingne, called the reshoots a “gift”.
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“It’s hugely ambitious and it was only when we were on the ground and physicalizing so many different aspects of the character development that you could see there were some gaps that we needed to fill in and we’re very blessed that Amazon believes in the show and were right behind it. The confidence to do those reshoots was the greatest gift to us. I’m so grateful that we got to go back and do another take of some of the first work we did,” he told Deadline at the TCA summer press tour.
The show, which filmed in Prague, is set in a Victorian fantasy world mythological immigrant creatures whose exotic homelands were invaded by the empires of man. Philostrate and Stonemoss rekindle a dangerous affair despite an increasingly intolerant society and Vignette harbors a secret that endangers Philo’s world during his most important case yet: a string of gruesome murders threatening the uneasy peace of the Row.
Travis Beacham, who created the project 17 years ago as spec script A Killing On Carnival Row, added, “The advantage of when you have a true series order like this is that you shoot all eight episodes, then you can go back and look at the whole and watch as well as we can watch. Are we setting up the things that pay off as well as we can set them up? It’s a function of the size of it and the scope of what we’ve been allowed to do.”
He added, “There’s stigma when it comes to reshoots but increasingly in this world of peak TV where shows are getting bigger and bigger, it becomes necessary.”
Showrunner Marc Guggenheim agreed, saying that “some of the most ambitious things we did in the first season were done during those reshoots”.
Bloom and Delevingne also opened up about the show’s immigration themes during the panel. The pair talked up the “fear” of immigration, a particularly relevant theme for today’s current political environment.
Delevingne said fear comes from the government, while Bloom said, “It looks at the fear that people have. I think there’s so much fear in the world today about immigrants, migrants, how are they going to come into our society.”
The show, which launches August 30, has already been picked up for a second season and the cast and crew promise that it will be even “bigger and better”.
Elsewhere, Delevingne jokes that she’d like Amazon to build a Carnival Row theme park to get across the world.
Carnival Row is from Amazon Studios and Legendary Television, with executive producers Guggenheim, Rene Echevarria, Jon Amiel, Bloom and Beacham.
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