Heavenly creatures: His Dark Materials delivers the angels unto season 3 in first look
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The Amber Spyglass is by far the most out-there of author Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy. If the presence of the mulefa didn't tip you off — those creatures from an alternate dimension that look like giant elephants moving about on spherical seed sacks — there's also the concepts of the Authority, the Land of the Dead, Gallivespians (little humanoids that ride around on insects), and even more parallel-world hopping.
His Dark Materials, HBO's TV series adaptation, finally gets to dig into all of that in the third and final season, premiering this December. But the elements that had the team pulling their hair out the most were the angels.
"We all know what angels look like, don't we? We've seen them in religious iconography. They're kind of like us but with wings," showrunner Jane Tranter tells EW. "Then you think about it and go, well, they're not really like us with wings because they're nearly always some form of masculine. Philip Pullman's angels aren't based on a Christian religion angel. The religious aspects he talks about in the book are from his own imagination. How do they fly? How do they move between worlds? How do they communicate? That was the really big, juicy, magnificent, brilliant privilege that we had to untie that knot."
EW can exclusively reveal the first look at the final results of this exhaustive process.
HBO The angels cometh! 'His Dark Materials' season 3 brings the first look at the heavenly creatures.
His Dark Materials season 1 introduced Dafne Keen as Lyra Belacqua, a young girl from a parallel world where a person's soul exists outside the body in the form of a talking animal companion called a daemon. (Lyra's daemon is Pan, voiced by Heartstopper breakout Kit Connor.) The angels are now descending onto the scene at a time when her world has expanded a great deal. She met Will Parry (Amir Wilson), a young boy from our world and the destined bearer of the Subtle Knife, an artifact with the ability to cut open portals to other universes. And there's a prophecy making the rounds that foresees Lyra as the new Eve (as in Adam and Eve) who will make a choice that affects all of humanity.
Tranter reveals that the team came up with a "very beautiful painted legend that happens at the start of the first episode" this season to explain the angels' role in all this mythology in His Dark Materials.
Season 2 was the production's first time realizing these heavenly creatures on screen through the form of six-winged statues made in their honor. Tranter says, "We never moved away from that being the shape of the wings." After speaking to Mary Malone (Simone Kirby), the angels then emerged at the end of season 2... well, kind of. They appeared within balls of light, but their specific forms were intentionally left blurry. "We weren't ready to entirely commit to what they were," Tranter notes of that moment.
In season 3, the angels will now take more physical forms. Actors Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (Justice League), Simon Harrison (Endeavour), and Chipo Chung (Into the Badlands) will portray Balthamos, Baruch, and Xaphania, respectively, some of the noteworthy rebel angels from this story. "All the makeup was insane," Keen recalls. "I remember being on set with Chip Chung and I literally could not look anywhere else. It was creepy. I couldn't stop staring at them cause they looked so sick."
HBO Amir Wilson's Will Parry observes an angel in 'His Dark Materials' season 3.
The angels in Pullman's books are described as beings made entirely out of light, which doesn't quite work for television. Still, Tranter says they tried all options to see what worked. She feared what she calls "the Tinkerbell effect."
"Not that I don't love Tinkerbell. I think Tinkerbell's amazing," she adds. "But these are angels, they're not Tinkerbells." She came to a reconciliation. The angels would take more corporeal forms when they were down on Earth. "They definitely look different," Tranter notes. "Their eyes are different, their heads are different, their skins are different, they kind of shimmer. But they have a uniform, if you like, that is not of our world. It's not them in naked angel form."
"There's a description of them in the books. To see them in their real form is more like looking at architecture than it is looking at a person," James McAvoy, a massive Pullman fan, says. "That was just brilliant. It's like skyscrapers floating through the sky. That's what I always saw of them."
After appearing briefly in season 1 and even less in season 2, McAvoy makes a more prominent return as Lord Asriel in His Dark Materials season 3 — and the angels are a big part of it. Asriel is waging war against the Authority, which is essentially God. He sees this celestial being as more of an authoritarian that has enslaved humanity, and he forms his own army (including rebel angels) to combat that regime. Tranter calls it "McAvoy as Asriel unleashed."
HBO James McAvoy returns as Lord Asriel in 'His Dark Materials' season 3.
So much of the information book readers learn about angels and the Authority in The Amber Spyglass comes off screen, if you will. So Jack Thorne, the screenwriter behind His Dark Materials, came up with a way to get some of that intel across to viewers of the show more directly: He created a new angelic character, named Alarbus, who interacts with Asriel "to help contextualize what's going on in the kingdom of heaven," Tranter reveals.
McAvoy had clear ideas of how to play Asriel. That came from his love of the source material. The actor has read the books three times at this point. He feels he might have come across as "a pain in the ass" to Tranter. "I think she enjoyed working with me. Jesus Christ, I hope so," he jokes. "I'm the custodian of this character. That's my job," he adds. "I need to make sure that [Asriel's] portrayed fittingly in the way that he's meant to be portrayed. And to do that, Jane and I had conversations about redirecting what's happening, generally, to bring it back to the books."
In season 1, McAvoy says, "Nobody knew what the f--- [Asriel] was doing." As it all comes to the light in season 3, viewers will see more of the military man bubbling within him.
"He's such a dick and he's such a bad father. He's doing it for the right reasons, but he's doing it all the wrong way," McAvoy explains. "The destination is more important than the journey for him. The ends totally justify the means for him. He's a leader and a world-changer and a thinker and a doer before he is a father." McAvoy wouldn't call him a messiah, because that has too many religious connotations for someone who is anti-organized religion. Instead, he brings up Spartacus in the sense that Asriel has a will to make things happen. "The things that he can do as a cog in the revolutionary wheel serve to make him believe that he is the man of destiny who has been chosen by fate to free all thinking beings from this horrible oppression. His ego grows with it. And so you see a bit of the manic, fevered ego a bit more."
HBO Victoria Hamilton steps in for the late Helen McCrory as the voice of Stelmaria, Asriel's daemon, in 'His Dark Materials' season 3.
Tranter says this season is much more ambitious than what we've seen from previous seasons from a production standpoint with all these high-concept components, including the angels. Being that this is the conclusion to the series, it also comes with a responsibility, like the books, to answer the those lingering burning questions established in seasons 1 and 2.
"Season 3 is wild. It's 100 percent the weirdest thing I've ever shot in my entire life," 17-year-old Keen agrees. "We've done so many weird locations and just surreal scenes where you're talking about angels and God and the most random things ever. It was wild to film it and all the set dressing and everything was insane. If the other two [seasons] were already very fantastic, this one was a whole other level of that."
Make sure to check out EW's Fall TV Preview cover story — as well as all of our 2022 Fall TV Preview content, releasing over 22 days through Sept. 29.
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