Created for television by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the HBO drama series Westworld is as ambitious as it is thought-provoking, exploring fascinating themes of humanity and human intelligence, and with a cast that couldn’t get any better. It is a dark odyssey about artificial consciousness, in a world in which every human appetite, no matter how noble or depraved, can be indulged, if you pay the right price. The series stars Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Evan Rachel Wood, Jeffrey Wright, James Marsden, Thandie Newton, Jimmi Simpson, Ben Barnes, Tessa Thompson and Rodrigo Santoro, among many others.

During this exclusive phone interview with Collider, actor Jeffrey Wright (who plays Bernard Lowe, the brilliant head of the park’s Programming Division) talked about building the first season, the masterful work of showrunners Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy, what sold him on being a part of this series, playing the character that leads the audience through the archeological dig to the center of things, how he was given a fair amount of information about where things were head, and that he’s explored the Westworld Delos website, www.discoverwestworld.com.

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Image via HBO

Collider: What’s it been like for you to be a part of Westworld and to work with showrunners Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy?

JEFFREY WRIGHT: For all of us who worked on this, it took a bit longer than we had expected to get the first season out, but that wasn’t a function of turmoil on the set or all kinds of chaos. It was really just the difficult logistics of creating a first season, building these stories and writing these scripts from scratch, and also constructing the sets that are this vast world. We were all so deeply in love with the work that we were doing and loved working with each other. Throughout the entire process, we were just really over the moon about the work that we were being asked to do, and the level of storytelling that Lisa and Jonah were cranking out. It was next level stuff. They have a really frighteningly masterful control over the multiple layers and multiple narratives that work to form this show. There are so many different ends to tie up, and they do it with seeming ease. I can’t say enough about them. TV is never easy. That’s been my experience with long-form drama. But they had to have been working 25 hours a day, and with a young daughter, too. They are superhuman. Maybe they’re super A.I. I don’t know. They definitely are an army of two master storytellers.

How did this all come about for you? What was it about the way this was pitched to you that sold you?

WRIGHT: They won me over pretty easily. I got the call from Jonah that he would like me to consider the show and look at the script. At the time, Anthony Hopkins was on board, J.J. Abrams was producing, and it was for HBO. That, alone, was a pretty compelling invitation. Then, on reading the script, I discovered this really carefully constructed, balanced story that was multi-layered and had intimate possibility because of the nature of the technology and the nature of the park. I thought, “This could be an interesting ride.” And then, as well, I’d been involved in The Hunger Games series and I had another long-form drama on HBO, Boardwalk Empire, but I hadn’t been at Ground Zero for either of those pieces. In the case of The Hunger Games, the others went in and created this huge phenomenon. With Boardwalk Empire, they took several years to build this wonderful party, and then I showed up and had the punch and all the food. It was a really exciting challenge for me to take the risk of being at the ground floor of a project like this, and be a part of the early pioneering hands that set about trying to build the thing. All of those things combined made the invitation a very easy one to say yes to.

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Image via HBO

We entered this world through the eyes of the hosts, and then started to learn more about it through the people behind the scenes who help run things and interact with the A.I., but we don’t really get to see any of the outside world and we don’t really get to learn about these individuals outside of the world they live in, in Westworld. How and why do you think Bernard ended up where he is?

WRIGHT: It’s clear, from the start, that he’s really deeply engaged in the technology. He loves the work and he’s fascinated by the work. He also has a deep respect for Dr. Ford. We also hint, early on, that there are some backstory issues that have driven him even more deeply into his work. He’s committed to the place, but in a different way than Dr. Ford is committed. Dr. Ford is the originator. He’s the Walt Disney/Colonel Kurtz of this place, and he’s committed to it because this technology is his life, but also there is a clinical and maybe even misanthropic detachment that has overtaken Ford’s life, for whatever reason. I think there’s a tension that’s built out of the different sensibilities of Ford and Bernard. Whereas Bernard takes on a much more sensitive relationship to the work and to the hosts, Ford insists that they be viewed absent of emotions and solely as machines. They’re beautiful, extraordinary, complex machines, but nonetheless machines that are tools for the purposes of the pleasure and indulgences of the guests. And they’re not only tools for the indulgences of the guests, but for Ford, as well. They serve to give him comfort in a world in which he seems not to have found that level of comfort. Those are all part of the explorations that the first season will lead us on. Why this place? Why this technology? And Bernard is very much leads the audience through the archeological dig to the center of things.

Ford has become so detached while Bernard is becoming more and more attached, especially when it comes to Dolores. Is Bernard just curious about the abnormalities present in some of the A.I., or does it go deeper than that?

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Image via HBO

WRIGHT: I think Bernard is fascinated by the idea of synthetic consciousness and the idea that they could be or are creating new life forms. Ford is not interested in that. Ford reminds Bernard that they’re not real and that it’s all an allusion, and that if you think any further about it, it can be dangerous. Perhaps we’ll find that there are reasons that Bernard is desirous of these discoveries and perhaps we’ll find out later on that the conversations he’s had with Dolores are very specific in their intent. That will all be a part of the discovery for the audience, as far as the origins and the past, present and future of this mad circus known as Westworld.

What does someone like Bernard think of Ford, who had a hand in creating this place, and what does he think of the guests who go there?

WRIGHT: I don’t think Bernard spends much of his time thinking about the guests and their behaviors because he’s so immersed in the world of this technology and his work and with the multi-layered complexity of these hosts. There’s an entire world for him to inhabit there, just in that alone. That gives him very little time to consider the behavior of the guests. That’s not his job. His job is to reprogram, correct and improve the workability of the hosts. Whereas Ford spends so much time immersed in that side of things, he’s really created a world so that he does not have to interact with the world outside. That, in and of itself, is commentary on his perspective on the behavior of the guests.

If you were someone who could be a guest in a place like this, have you thought about what your ideal world would look and be like and who your ideal host would be?

WRIGHT: I, Jeffrey Wright, the actor, actually signed on to the Westworld Delos website. My profile came back as a Libertine, which is probably reasonably accurate. I’d spend my time out there, being free and ideally on someone else’s dime. The bill was staggering.

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Image via HBO

Westworld is a pretty sexy place, but it’s also very violent and, at times, disturbing. At what point, in this season, do you think viewers will have the best grasp on just how vast this world actually is?

WRIGHT: The first season is very much about stacking up the layers of narrative and, at the same time, digging down through those layers to understand the forces behind them. We really don’t discover fully what Westworld is for this first season, until we get there. The first 10 episodes are the journey. The colors become brighter, the vistas become clearer, and the history is more understood with each step we take, along the way. You’ve gotta just carry on. You suspect that you know what’s happening to you, but you may be off by one or a few degrees.

When you started out on this journey with the information that you had, at the beginning, by the time you got to the finale of the first season, did it end up where you thought it would?

WRIGHT: I was given a fair amount of information, after we shot the pilot, about where we were headed because Bernard is so much at the center of things and is the onion peeler for the audience. The nature of his job there is to peel back the layers of the onion and re-patch them, as though they’re pristine. For that reason, he has access to information that’s critical to understanding the full experience of this show. So, I knew perhaps a bit more, at the start of the show, because of that and because I needed to understand the mysteries that I was being asked to solve.

Westworld airs on Sunday nights on HBO.

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