Starring an ensemble cast including Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden, Westworld is the new primetime attraction, Mondays at 9 a.m., on HBO, with same day primetime encore at 9 p.m.. It is available on HBO GO.
Westworld is a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the evolution of sin, exploring a world in which every human appetite, no matter how noble or depraved, can be indulged. Created for television by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, both of whom are executive producing and writing, with Nolan also directing, the series was inspired by the 1973 motion picture Westworld, written and directed by Michael Crichton.
Co-creator Nolan explains, “Building on the incredibly evocative concept of the original film, we wanted to pose the question: If you could be completely immersed in a fantasy, one in which you could do whatever you wanted, would you discover things about yourself that you didn’t want to know?”
Co-creator Joy adds, “We also wanted to explore what it means to be human from the outside in – through the eyes of the ‘hosts’: the lifelike AI characters that are the main attractions of the park. It’s a meditation on consciousness – the blessing and the burden of it – beautifully portrayed by our remarkable cast.”
Among the main players are: Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the brilliant, taciturn and complicated creative director, chief programmer and founder of Westworld, who has an uncompromising creative vision for the park. The Man in Black (Ed Harris) is the distillation of pure villainy into one man. Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) is a provincial, beautiful and kind rancher’s daughter, who begins to discover that her entire idyllic existence is an elaborately constructed lie.
Teddy Flood (James Marsden), a new arrival to a small frontier town, quickly proves both his charm and talent with a revolver. Beautiful, razor-sharp madam Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton) has a genius for reading people and a knack for survival, but her seen-it-all-before worldview is about to be challenged. Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) is the brilliant and quixotic head of the park’s Programming Division, whose keen observation of human nature provides him with boundless inspiration for his life’s work: creating artificial people.