What’s It Like to Wear 3 Body Problem’s Seriously Shiny Video-Game Headset? The Sci-Fi Series’ Cast Takes Us Inside — Watch

Kimberly Roots
·2 min read
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There are huge, deep, reality-altering questions at the heart of Netflix’s new sci-fi series 3 Body Problem. But when TVLine kicked off our recent chat with the show’s cast, we were more concerned with a small, silly one:

What did it feel like to wear that silver virtual-reality headset while shooting?

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Let’s back up a bit. For those not familiar with The Three Body Problem, the first of author Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past novel trilogy, the story largely concerns a Chinese scientist who becomes aware of a virtual-reality video game that may not be what it at first seems. In Netflix’s series adaptation, which begins streaming on Thursday, a group of Oxford alumni learn about the game — played by wearing a shiny, silver helmet free of wires and screens — at the same time that scientists in their orbit start dying in quick succession.

Putting aside the existential threat and all, we were curious to know what it felt like to slip on the sleek prop. So we asked cast members Jovan Adepo (Sorry for Your Loss), Jess Hong (New Zealand’s The Brokenwood Mysteries), John Bradley (Game of Thrones), Alex Sharp (The Good Lord Bird), Rosalind Chao (Star Trek: The Next Generation) and Zine Tseng for their thoughts on the matter.

“It was a bit like being in a sort of isolation tank,” Bradley says in the video above, “in so much as you can’t see anything, you can’t really hear anything. You know that life is going on around you but there’s no way of connecting with it. It felt a bit like being mummified — alive.”

3-body-problem-headset-john-bradley-interview-netflix
3-body-problem-headset-john-bradley-interview-netflix

3 Body Problem hails from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and The Terror: Infamy‘s Alexander Woo. The cast also includes Thrones‘ Liam Cunningham and Jonathan Pryce, as well as Benedict Wong (She-Hulk: Attorney at Law), Eiza González (Ambulance) and Ben Schnetzer (Y: The Last Man). All eight hour-long Season 1 episodes will be available to stream on Thursday.

Press PLAY on the video above to see how the rest of the cast’s headset experiences compared to Bradley’s (and to find out who “tampered with it a little bit”), then hit the comments: Are you planning to watch 3 Body Problem?

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