‘Westworld’ Season 2 Will Be Twice As Ambitious

Production is finally set to begin on Westworld Season 2. And while we’re not likely to learn much about the highly anticipated return of HBO‘s hit drama until closer to the premiere, producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are already dropping hints about what to expect.

While speaking with Variety on the Remote Controlled Podcast, the showrunners said the second season is going to be even more ambitious than what fans saw in the show’s first year.

“It’s an ambitious season,” Nolan said. “We always knew that we wanted the stakes and the scope to increase dramatically and that means the scale of production increases as well. We have an amazingly talented group of writers, directors, and crew coming back and gearing up for what I think and what I hope will prove to be a season twice as ambitious as the first one.”

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Despite his character meeting a grisly end in the first season finale, Nolan said that Anthony Hopkins will still loom large in Season 2.

“I think the sacrifice he makes at the end of the first season is very real,” Nolan said. “I think there will be an opportunity to explore a little bit more of the backstory of how this park came to be, a little more of that story. We’ll see the character’s presence will be felt in that sense in terms of filling in a few more of the gaps about the early history of this place.”

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Joy said that mystery will continue being an integral aspect of the show, but advised against going online to scrutinize certain plot points that could get spoiled.

“For us, even though we’re creating it as we go along, we feel like we owe it to the fans to be bold and also to play this game with them where we’re like, ‘Do you want to figure it out? Do you want to play with us here?’” Joy said. “Hopefully now, because of the first season, the people who want to have this purist interpretation of the series, they’ll just develop their own theories in a vacuum — and maybe don’t log on to Reddit.”

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The second season of Westworld will premiere in 2018.