Summary

Collider’s Steve Weintraub talks with Lee Pace and Laura Birn for Foundation Season 3.

Season 3 of Apple TV+’s hit sci-fi series premieres on the streamer on July 11.

In this interview, Pace and Birn discuss Foundation’s challenging scenes, evolving narrative, and uniqueness.

The highly anticipated third season of AppleTV+’s sci-fi epic Foundation, based on Isaac Asimov’s novels, is due to premiere on the streaming platform on July 11, continuing the political tension established in the series’ first two seasons and the Empire’s struggle to preserve their grasp on the galaxy while in the wake of a war with the Foundation. In its third run on the platform, Collider’s Therese Lacson heralds it as “your next sci-fi binge,” asserting that there has “never been a better time than now to discover one of the most underrated shows on Apple TV+.” Returning for Season 3 from both of the series’ first two seasons are Lee Pace and Laura Birn. Pace stars as Brother Day, the clone of the Galactic Emperor who enjoys limitless power and the illusion of comfort he tries to maintain despite the turmoil in the galaxy. Birn, meanwhile, continues to portray Demerzel, the eternally loyal android to the Cleonic dynasty whose mechanical surface masks a deeply emotional undercurrent. Collider’s Steve Weintraub interviewed Pace and Birn about the upcoming third season of Foundation, where the pair first reveal their favorite movie theaters, and Pace teases his excitement about his role in Edgar Wright’s upcoming film The Running Man. As for the series, the duo discuss the evolving narrative, how scripts are continually shifted to reveal more about the story and its characters, the challenging and rewarding sequences they’ve been central to in the three seasons, and how the science fiction aspects are shaped by showrunner and creator David S. Goyer’s own scientific curiosity.
Lee Pace Calls Edgar Wright’s ‘The Running Man’ “a Ton of Fun”

The duo also discuss their favorite movie theaters.

Image via Paramount Pictures

COLLIDER: Lee, I am a huge fan of Edgar Wright, and I know that you are in The Running Man, which I cannot wait to see. What can you tease about getting to work with Edgar and that project? LEE PACE: I’m also a huge fan of Edgar Wright, so the chance to get to work with him on this movie was really a dream come true, and the movie’s a ton of fun. I had a great time shooting it. The cast is fun, the tone is fun. It’s gonna be like a big, fun movie. So I’m really excited to see it come together. I’m excited to see it on a big screen, it’s gonna be good. I know we’re talking about a TV show, but I’m obsessed with getting more people to see movies in movie theaters. Do you have a favorite movie theater? PACE: Oh yeah, I do, actually. I live in New York, so it’s such a part of being a New Yorker is having so many. There’s Film Forum, there’s Angelika, but lately Angelika just got Village East over on Third Avenue, and I love that movie theater. I love the size of it. I love how big and old-fashioned it is. I recently saw The Brutalist there when it opened, that first weekend, and there was such a cool crowd of people there to watch the movie. It added to the experience of the movie. So everyone got up at intermission, and you’re like, “All of these cool smart people are liking the movie as much as I did; I’m in the right place.” LAURA BIRN: I also have a favorite one in Helsinki, where I live. It’s close by my house. It’s also an old-fashioned one. It used to be the Film Archive, which has now changed to another location, but now they’re kind of running a mixture of old films and new ones, like the premieres, and it’s just beautiful. I love the thing that anyone who goes there won’t take loads of food with them, but it’s kind of like people go there to watch the film and to be together in that energy, but kind of respectful. So, it’s not about this feast. The benches are so soft and kind of worn out and old, but still soft. It’s my favorite place, one of my favorite places in Helsinki.
‘Foundation’ Season 3 Shines a Light on Events From Earlier Seasons

Everything’s a rumor until you’ve seen it on the series.

Jumping into Foundation. Lee, this is probably the most serious question I’ll ask during our conversation. Is it in your contract that you need to be shirtless half the season? I’m joking, but kind of. PACE: The Emperor has no clothes. I’m just messing around. PACE: [Laughs] Honestly, we’re just messing around, too. When I’m playing the Emperor of the Galaxy, there were different ideas for what I would wear during that spiral in that first season, and I just kind of thought, “Well, he’s one of the more famous emperors. It’s the naked emperor with no clothes, so why don’t I have a good time with this?”

Image via Apple TV+

100%. One of the things that I love about Season 3 is the way that it shines a light on the first two seasons. You learn so much new information about the first two seasons through watching this season. How much did you know when you were filming, and how much were you learning as you were getting these scripts? PACE: We knew some things that have turned out to be true, and then we heard other things that have turned out not to be true. BIRN: The rumors in the world of Foundation are wild. [Laughs] PACE: I would just say until you see it on the show, it’s a rumor. Which of the 10 episodes from season 3 are you most excited for fans to see and why? PACE: I find the turning points always really interesting in a story this big, and Foundation is not a story that is afraid of major reversals. We’ll set up one big idea just to have the rug pulled out from it in a way that very much upends the chessboard. I have an episode a little bit past the midway point where Day’s mind opens up to a way of thinking about something that is very close and familiar to him that he never even would have considered. That’s, I guess, the non-spoiler way I could say it. BIRN: It’s so hard to take one episode out, but I think for Demerzel, kind of towards the end, where Demerzel and Cleon’s relationship opens something very new for her, but then also big wheels start to turn, and you can’t stop the wheels turning. I just found the whole thing, the writing and the rhythm of it all, took me over. So, I would say maybe somewhere there towards the end.

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Demerzel Takes a Very “Melancholic,” Human Turn This Season

She’s grappling with “very human, deep understandings of herself.”

Image via Apple TV+

One of the things that I loved about this season with Demerzel is the way that she is trying to figure out her place. What are the rules of her situation? She’s pushing on the walls, if you will. How much fun was it to play that? What was your reaction? Because it’s so interesting watching her try to find those boundaries. BIRN: I found this season even melancholic for her, like longing for something that you don’t even know what you long for, and I find that very recognizable. Then, having those restrictions and being able to find maybe a little path that goes around. I felt it was very internal, also, for me, this season, the whole work, because the Cleons, they’ve drifted further and then there’s these grasps of trying to open up to someone, to have someone to emphasize you, but there’s no one in the galaxy who can, because there’s no one who is imprisoned in that way or who carries that burden of remembering everything. She’s just endlessly lonely. I feel like the space around her just tightens and tightens until something happens. I found the whole season very emotional for her. That’s also interesting, that suddenly she’s so human. She’s a mechanical being, but at the same time, she’s capable of these very human, deep understandings of herself and everything. So yeah, melancholic, emotional, huge, but held inside, kind of spiraling towards it. I love the writing.
‘Foundation’ Has Perfected This Sci-Fi Hurdle

As the Foundation expands, so does the narrative.

That’s something I want to touch on. I commend Apple TV+ for their exceptional sci-fi series, but what I love about this show is the way it doesn’t water down anything for anyone. It is a hard sci-fi. There’s just so much I love about it. Can you talk about the writing and how it’s so unique compared to the way so many other things give you too much exposition and water it down? PACE: One of the big things we had to get right from the very beginning was to create a vast, vast universe, and it’s taken time to do it. We’ve had to do it by degrees. This is my observation as the actor looking at the writing of it. In the first season, it was Trantor, and then way on the far side of the galaxy, this little tiny colony on Terminus, and a couple of other planets and areas and dark space in between. That’s all we knew of the galaxy at that point. The second season, the Cloud Dominion comes in. There are other kinds of factors at play inside the galaxy. Ingus comes in, and it gets a bit bigger, a bit more diverse. Then, in this season, Foundation has now expanded into not just a few planets that are kind of working together, but into a political force that rivals the Empire. The Empire has decreased, and the people in the palace don’t have the power they once did. So the political landscape has all changed. But would you have ever understood what that big power dynamic was if you didn’t have that time to live with Trantor and that little colony in New Terminus? That’s like England and those ships that landed in the New World, and 300 years later, this is where we are. That’s the analogy that you can form. BIRN: Also, I feel like this show doesn’t sacrifice the character for this vastness and the universes. Then you have characters that are not written to represent one thing, or just to be good or bad, but it’s always so layered and nuanced in the relationship, and they change, and you get surprised by that. So, also, the writing for characters has been so rich the whole time. It doesn’t matter if the action is epic if you don’t care about the characters. That’s the reason I watched the show is the characters.
‘Foundation’s Challenges Are the “Best Things” About Filming

“Those are the things that stay with you forever.”

Image via Apple TV+

In the making of any project, there’s always going to be a scene or sequence along the way that becomes more challenging than you’re expecting. For both of you, what scene or sequence during the making of Foundation ended up being more challenging or more unexpected than you anticipated going in? PACE: I always like a challenge. I always think the challenges are really fun. I would say the fights last season. I just thought, “Gosh, we’ve got this violent emperor, let’s make him really violent and really have a good time with these fights. Let him put the fight on his skin. He doesn’t need weapons. He’s gonna use his hands. That’s who he is.” It was a lot of work, and it was a challenge, too, because it took a lot of rehearsal. It took a lot of effort to put them together. But in doing that, I learned so much about the character that season and was able to inhabit him in a way that, even in the scenes that I wasn’t fighting in, I could taste him in a way. BIRN: I would say, also, that the best things are the most challenging ones. For me, in Season 2, the dungeon scene where we learn where she comes from. The way it was built, the set, everything, it was so mechanical and yet, at the same time, so emotional, kind of like me being segmented into pieces, only being able to use my eyes. I love the challenge. So usually, the most challenging things are the ones that you fall in love with most. Those are the things that stay with you forever, because they’re so special. Foundation season 3 premieres exclusively on AppleTV+ with Episode 1 on July 11.

Foundation

Release Date

September 23, 2021

Network

Apple TV+

Showrunner

David S. Goyer

Directors

Alex Graves, Roxann Dawson, Jennifer Phang, Mark Tonderai, Andrew Bernstein

Writers

Jane Espenson, Leigh Dana Jackson, Liz Phang, Eric Carrasco, David Kob, Addie Manis, Marcus Gardley, Lauren Bello, Olivia Purnell