[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Shadow and Bone Season 1.]
Adapting any beloved book series is tricky, but try combining characters from the same book series that appear in very different parts of the timeline. That was the task that stood before Arrival screenwriter Eric Heisserer when he signed on to executive produce and showrun Netflix’s Shadow and Bone, but it’s a challenge he set for himself. When Heisserer first went into Netflix to pitch on Shadow and Bone, the streaming service did not have the rights to author Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows duology, which takes place years after the events of the Shadow and Bone trilogy and focuses on more grounded, non-magically powered characters. And yet Heisserer stood firm in his belief that the best version of a Shadow and Bone adaptation incorporated the beloved Six of Crows characters Kaz, Jesper, and Inej.
He was right, of course. Netflix eventually did land the rights to Bardugo’s Six of Crows duology, and Heisserer then set about creating a storyline that would still focus on Shadow and Bone’s Alina Starkov (Jessie Mei Lei) – a young mapmaker who exhibits tremendous power and comes to be known as the “Sun Summoner” – but would also bring Kaz (Freddy Carter), Inej (Amita Suman) and Jesper (Kit Young) into the story.
Heisserer and his writers were wildly successful. The first season of Shadow and Bone – which is now streaming on Netflix – is a thrilling, compelling, and addictive story of outsiders thrust into the spotlight, the struggle against prejudice, and of course the battle between good and evil. And the minute the final episode ends, you’re dying to see a Season 2.
So I was thrilled to get the chance to speak with Heisserer recently about all things Shadow and Bone. He discussed the process of incorporating the Six of Crows characters and why that was important to him, how they went about casting the series, and the involvement of Bardugo as they were charting the course for the season and the series overall.
We also got into full Season 1 spoilers as we discussed Ben Barnes’ Darkling character, how they went about deciding when to reveal his true nature, and that haunting flashback scene in Episode 7. We talked about why it was important to humanize the show’s antagonist, and how the writers looked towards characters like Magneto and Kilmonger for inspiration. Heisserer also discussed the finale, and how they had to adjust their original plans for the ending due to budget constraints. And he revealed what fans can expect to see in a potential Shadow and Bone Season 2 if Netflix renews the series, and how many seasons he thinks this story might last.
It’s a wide-ranging, spoiler-filled, deep-dive discussion about a series that I think a lot of people are going to quickly fall in love with. Check out the full interview below.
I know you pitched Netflix with a take that would incorporate characters from Six of Crows into this show. And this may be an obvious question because they're obviously so cool, but why was it important for you to incorporate Kaz, Inej and Jesper in your take on Shadow and Bone and then in actually doing the work, did you find it challenging to create new stories for them?
ERIC HEISSERER: I was excited about including them because it did two things for us. First, it showcased the expansiveness of Leigh's world. You don't get as big a view and an understanding of different cultures and countries in the Grisha trilogy, at least when you start out. Shadow and Bone had kind of a singular "chosen one" storyline, and there's so much more to that world as explored by our Crows characters and in later books. And I wanted to set the stage properly for that.
And the second was really exploring the themes of the characters and Alina and Mal are kids who are really growing up being told that they don't matter. They're marginalized, they're kind of like cannon fodder. And I felt there were similar themes with our Crows characters and that thematic glue to help unite all of them felt like a strong play to have them part of the story from the beginning. And luckily, Leigh cross-pollinates her characters in later books a lot, so it didn't feel like I was bringing a new idea to the table. It was just a case of introducing it sooner.
One of the things I found really remarkable about the show is the cast. Aside from Ben Barnes, it’s a lot of really up-and-coming actors. And I was just curious how you went about the casting process and if it ended up being maybe easier or harder than you thought to find the right fits for each character?
HEISSERER: Well, for starters, we didn't have a lot of money and they were taking a big risk on us, so we wanted to be smart about it. But for me, I was far more interested in someone who came in and absolutely nailed the behavior of a character, whether or not I'd seen them before in anything else. Because I felt like at that point in time, these faces and these actors would essentially imprint upon us as the characters and we wouldn't think, "Oh, that is a famous actor playing the part of Kaz Brekker," or whatever.
Something that I found worked really well, was the chemistry between especially the Crows characters. Were you working to kind of fit people together then? Did you have chemistry reads to see how people worked together?
HEISSERER: Amita [Suman] was our earliest hire on the Crows side of things and we were completely in love with her portrayal of Inej. You end up building chemistry around your early finds, therefore we brought in Freddy [Carter] and Kit [Young] at different times and put those three in a mix. And we did that type of chemistry read for several combinations until we found the lightning in the bottle that was those three. That they just gave off the vibe of the perfect kind of trio of criminals that have done plenty of heists together before and had a history to them.
I remember we were setting up the cameras for the chemistry read for Freddy, Kit and Amita at the tail end to record for Netflix. And the three of them are just essentially finding their marks and figuring out how to pose and Kit sort of casually just put his hand on Freddy's shoulder, Freddy gave him this withering look of like, "Are you actually touching me?" And it was such a Kaz Brekker beat that we all lost it. We're like, "Are we recording?"
And similarly, we found Jessie [Mei Li]. We were so blessed to find Jessie early because we figured that was going to be a months-long process, but then it was harder to find Mal. It was very difficult and she suffered through countless chemistry reads where we pulled her out of whatever it was she was doing so she could get to some audition taping space and try to find that spark and that magic. And we were really exhausted and at the tail end when Archie [Renaux] showed up and we all breathed a sigh of relief at that point.
Well, you also have the benefit of having the author as an executive producer on the series. What was Leigh's involvement on the show like?
HEISSERER: She was there from day one and she had maybe more involvement than she intended to (laughs). For the writers, she was that “phone a friend” consult. Every week she would come into the writer's room and we would pitch her episodes or talk through story. And my writer's assistant would have a several pages-long list of questions for her, from small and trivial to big mythology questions, and she endured all of that. And then, she was there with a voice and a say in every aspect of building this world because she's the creative historian of it. She knows this better than anybody else. And she has to be part of the creative process for things like the costuming of the Kefta or the background set design for the palace, the Little or Grand palace, that kind of thing.
I wanted to ask about specifically writing the first episode. Because you have to introduce the main characters, you have to explain what the Fold is. You have to explain the world. You have to give a sense of geography, where everything is. You also have to make it compelling enough for anyone to want to continue watching the show. I was curious how tackling that was and how tough it might've been to crack for you?
HEISSERER: It was an iterative process. We certainly went through various steps and some of it was research and development to figure out what new viewers would spark to and what confused them, but didn't sacrifice the world-building. And so much of the heavy lifting we had to do in the pilot of that kind of show. I would say that the opening couple of minutes were probably the most scrutinized and underwent the most changes even in post-production. It's one of those elements that I think is the hardest to get through in any big fantasy genre.
I had my foot down on the option of putting a text crawl up at the very beginning. I didn't want any text crawl. I just wanted to jump into the show, but then that meant finding other ways to deliver some critical exposition that hopefully doesn't derail an audience at the onset and just launches them into it.
And when it comes into the various vocabulary of the world, I had gotten pushback on that early on too, from members of the producer team, because they were worried that audiences won't know what any of it means. I don't want us to shy away from terms like Grisha or any of these other things, the various sub-orders. And I went back and explained it to them like if this were a show following a surgeon, if this were a prestige medical drama, the scripts would be littered with terminology of diseases of processes, of prescriptions, of any number of things, operations that we won't know as a general audience. We will accept it because we understand that it is a medical drama, and so we go in with that idea. What we want to connect with, of course, are the characters, their intents, their wants, their needs. And if we get that, if we can hook into that, then I think the rest is something they will learn along the way.
I wanted to ask about the scene where Kaz and Kirigan meet, which I'm sure is going to be a very exciting scene for fans of the books. How did that scene come about? What were the conversations with Leigh? Are you working towards teasing something that might come back in later seasons? How difficult was that to pull off?
HEISSERER: That was difficult particularly on the day of the production, because it was unbearably cold and some of our gear that we were intending to use for that didn't work. So we did what we could. But the confrontation felt inevitable, as soon as we put the Crows in the mix with the objective to grab Alina and bring her back to Ketterdam. We thought that this kind of showdown was bound to happen, so the question became how in the world could Kaz possibly survive that encounter?
It took our writers quite a number of days to figure out a smart play. But somebody had said, "You know, there are a couple of options here. The first is that you've been with a traveling entertainment troupe, and it's obvious they use phosphorus in their Alina-Volcra light show that they have on the stage. And secondly, if we want to go this far, Kaz at this point has likely hired a demo man by the name of Wylan that we won't meet in the first season in person, but could have very well have given him sort of an insurance policy phosphorus bomb to take with him." And we liked that idea a lot. That is, assuming that we have a Season 2. We could possibly tease that out later.
Speaking of Kirigan, I found him really compelling, not only because of Ben Barnes's performances, but really in the characterization and especially as we get into the final episodes. There's a scene I wanted to ask you about between him and Alina in the penultimate episode where he's trying to convince her that they both want the same thing, and you kind of understand where he's coming from, but of course, his actions and his methods are different and he dominates Alina. It almost felt like a bit like the T'Challa-Killmonger dynamic in Black Panther, where the best antagonist is one where you can see their point of view, even if their methods are morally bad. I was wondering if you could talk about your approach to writing the character, bringing him to life and doing it this way where it's not just like, "Oh, okay, bad guy." He literally says, "Make me your villain," as he's walking out of the room there.
HEISSERER: He does, that's actually a famous line in the books. We were excited about recreating that scene here and wanted to make sure that it landed right and followed his character arc. That's another reason why we were excited to showcase how he created the Shadow Fold in that distant flashback, where we see him a couple of centuries earlier. We do get a sense that he was a different man at that time. He's the kind of guy who does the wrong thing for what you could argue are the right reasons. And that's certainly helped in talking to Ben about the character and making sure that while he's still our main antagonist, he's not without some merit and some logic to his decision-making.
The writer's room talked often about characters like Magneto, Killmonger, villains that you see clearly what either their political or personal point of view is and you can't argue that those wounds aren't real for them. And that's really where all of the villainous Kirigan stuff emerged, is that we need to make sure that while he knows he's being cruel, it's because he has tried other means and they have not worked out for him.
Yeah. He's been at this a long time, as he says. It's been a while. He's out of patience.
HEISSERER: He is. He really is.
Did you guys toy with exactly where to reveal that he's actually the Black Heretic in terms of which episode it would go in?
HEISSERER: Yeah, we knew that we wanted to have that at the back end. It was very important for us to have that happen before he gets very dominating and, you know, kills an animal for instance. It had to be laid out so that you wouldn't find him irredeemable at that point. We really wanted to put him in a better light before making that light very harsh on him. I think it was moving around in the second half of the season and what made it work for us at the top of Episode 7 was how you start off in another time and it can be jarring just at the top of the episode to see Ben without his beard and you're not clocking the costumes here. Everything just feels of a slightly different era.
As you move into the finale, it's fascinating, Kirigan and Alina are bonded together with this power. And then obviously, she's able to break free and kind of cast him aside. And I was curious, where does that leave things with each character? Does she now fully have the powers of that stag and does he have fewer powers than he had before?
HEISSERER: She is fully powered up from the stag at this point. However, it's clear that he has tapped into merzost or a dark power in order to create the new creatures that step out of the Fold with him at the very end.
Yeah. Very haunting image.
HEISSERER: In the books, these are called Nichevo'ya, which is Ravkan for "nothing" and they will be a level up kind of opponent for Alina, Mal and anybody else who runs into Kirigan, should we be as privileged as to have a second season, because these are things that can walk around in broad daylight. Both of them have a level up going into the second season, but I think Alina knows somewhere in her gut that, even with the stag antler amplifier, she cannot draw enough light to take down the Fold. So we'll have to explore what other options are available for her in the second season.
Going into the finale, I know it's slightly different than the book, what were those conversations about where exactly to end it and how to end it because essentially, almost that entire episode is inside the Fold.
HEISSERER: Yeah, it is. And we had more and grander plans for the set piece inside the Fold and did not have the money for any of that. So we calmed it down to what you see in the finale now, but the real drive for us at the end was to give a proper breadth, a proper coda for a lot of these characters and send them on their way. You feel like there's more to the story, but you also feel like you do get some resolution at the end for some of them as well. And that was our biggest talk. So that we could have half of the episode that can cover this epic battle in which every shot is a VFX shot and oh my God, that was time-consuming. But then the other half where we just get to spend some moments with our characters and then see how a few of them might end up crossing paths, especially on the ship.
I know you also previously said that you originally pitched a three-season plan to Netflix. Now that you're on the other side of finishing season one, is that plan kind of intact? Has it changed?
HEISSERER: I can tell you with not an insignificant amount of embarrassment that I don't remember how or why I said I had a three-season plan. I had been up for 30 hours straight at that point when I sat down with Steve and the other reporters [for that set visit interview]. And so I certainly had my own monkey language going on in my brain. There's a lot for us to cover, of course. It can be far more than three seasons because Leigh's just written so many books and there's a lot of ground for us to cover. I feel like this is going to remain strong and healthy even at four seasons and beyond that, who knows? But I feel very nervous talking about that. I feel like I'm the baseball player pointing at the rafters and I have no idea.
Yeah. Because I mean, it could go either way. You could also get to, "Oops. It's actually much more than that."
HEISSERER: Yeah. And if it is, then let's do that. Let's make sure we carve out plenty of episodes and not crash something before it's time.
For sure. And everyone I've talked to who's seen it has loved it. And to that end, I am dying for a Season 2. Have you started any work on that? Has any preliminary planning gone into what you would do with season two?
HEISSERER: Well, if you were to see my home office right now, I do look like one of those crazy people with the murder board where there's just a bunch of maps and charts and string connecting things. I have exhaustive plans and would love to activate them. I've been thinking about this for several years now, and so the creative team and I are ready to roll if we hear that we get to come back.
The finale also sees the Six of Crows characters on a boat not only with Alina and Mal, but also with Nina. Could Season 2 potentially be getting into the Ice Court heist, or getting into more events from the actual Six of Crows book?
HEISSERER: I would love to talk about what we might get to see from Six of Crows in the second season. I can tease this much that there will be a hundred percent more Wylan. We'd like to introduce him for sure. And we would like to spend at least a little bit more time in Ketterdam. We kind of had to yoink our Crows away from that in Season 1 and throw them toward the Fold and beyond for their heist. And I think at least part of next season should be a home game for our team.
That is very good news to hear because one of the things I think is really striking about the show is the production design. I think it's fantastic. I really love the world of Ketterdam once we were in there.
HEISSERER: Oh yeah, right? They had to drag me out of the Crow Club when we were done shooting it.
That's fantastic. This final question is from my TV editor, very simple question. Why not more kissing?
HEISSERER: (Huge laugh) Why not more kissing? Well, the good news is I have plenty of plans for so much more kissing if we go forward in the future with the exception of Kaz and Inej, which, that's verboten. But I will say that several key relationships in this are a bit of a slow burn and you want to honor that. You want to have somewhere to go with it. It's not true for everybody, but I will just leave it at that.
Shadow and Bone is now streaming on Netflix.