Summary

Foundation Season 3 premieres on July 11 on AppleTV+, diving deeper into the war between the Foundation and the Empire.

Collider’s Steve Weintraub interviews Jared Harris, who continues to shape the series as Hari Seldon.

In this interview, Harris discusses how the scripts were constantly evolving, with new information from earlier seasons shaping the narrative strands and leaving fans with one big question after the Season 3 finale.

AppleTV+’s Foundation is gearing up to return for its highly anticipated third season, with Episode 1 premiering on July 11, exclusively on the streaming platform. Based on the novels by Isaac Asimov, the series explores the epic fall and attempted preservation of a galactic empire, and was created for the screen by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman. Season 3 will dive deeper into the forming war between the Foundation and the Empire, a continuation of the narrative that Collider’s Therese Lacson says bolsters Foundation as “one of the best space operas on television.” At the center of the narrative continues to be Jared Harris as Hari Seldon, a brilliant mathematician and psychologist who developed “psychohistory,” a science capable of predicting the future of future populations. Though his physical body dies in the early stages of the story, Harris’ performance continues to shape the series as Seldon’s digital consciousness guides the fate of civilization. In an interview with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, Harris discusses the latest season of Foundation. The pair get into how new information comes to light from events that occurred in earlier seasons, the aspects that influence the constantly evolving scripts of Foundation, what sequence has been the most challenging for him on the series thus far, and what question fans will be left with after watching the Season 3 finale.
Jared Harris Reflects on Nostalgic Movie Theaters

“Those are the ones that sort of live in my heart.”

Image via Apple TV+

But before we get into the show, I’m obsessed with getting more people to see movies in movie theaters. Do you have a favorite movie theater? HARRIS: You’re taking me back there. My favorite movie theaters in my heart were the ones on the corner that I used to go to on a hot afternoon in New York City and sit in the air-conditioned comfort and watch a double feature. There used to be a cinema on Fulham Road that I used to go to on the weekends, and you go and catch the latest movies. Those are the ones that sort of live in my heart. Again, one last thing before Foundation. I am a huge fan of Kathryn Bigelow, and I am over the moon that she has a new movie coming out at the end of the year, which you happen to be in. What can you tease about your role, the film, and getting to work with Catherine? HARRIS: I have no idea because I haven’t spoken to them yet. I don’t know what information they’ve put out there yet. There’ll be a time to do all that, but this isn’t it. Sure. You’re killing me. I really can’t wait to see it, but I’ll leave you alone.
‘Foundation’ Season 3 Stays “Breaking New Ground” on the “Fringes of Science”

Harris goes full Hari Seldon.

One of the things about Season 3 that is so cool is the way you learn new information about the first two seasons and why certain things happened and who was involved. When you were making the first two seasons, how much did you know about that information, and how much were you learning it as you were getting the scripts for Season 3? HARRIS: They sort of tease you with information, and they answer questions. Obviously, one of the questions we had was who was behind the Skybridge coming down, and they would answer it in a sort of oblique way that it wasn’t obvious, but they wouldn’t say who it was. I had some other information imparted towards me as ideas that he was going to introduce in Season 2 that he waited until Season 3 to introduce. Some part of it was to do with conversations that I had with David Goyer. One of the questions that I wanted to answer was the idea that psychohistory can’t predict the actions of an individual, but it can predict the actions of a huge number of individuals. It seemed as though if you had the ability of quantum computing on your hand, you should be able. It’s not because the data set is too massive that you cannot predict the actions of 100,000 or a million individuals, so what is it? We needed to come up and answer. My pitch to him was that everybody lies about their story. The dataset is corrupted, and in that sense, there was one character in the story who had an extensive knowledge of history, whose knowledge of that history would not be corrupted because that person had just observed history over a long period of time. Once he realized that there would be a way, he’d want to utilize that information. It’s interesting to hear in an interview you talk about psychohistory. It’s like I’m listening to Hari Seldon.

Related

What Is the Prime Radiant in ‘Foundation’?

What is the device that seems to hold all the answers?

One of the things I love about the show is how it doesn’t water down the sci-fi. It makes the audience lean in to really get it all. Can you talk about that aspect of the series and how it still has not tried to be a four-quadrant show, if you will, for kids and family? It’s for people who want this. HARRIS: That’s one of the things that was always true about it from the very beginning was that it punched up rather than punched down. It was one of the reasons why it might be that the first season was so dense. It was giving you a lot of information, a lot of sci-fi concepts, a lot of exotic science ideas that you were having to get to terms with, which now have sort of sunk in and become familiar, and you’ve accepted. I know that he, as in David Goyer, is always curious to discover and educate himself about ideas and science that are right on the fringes of science, breaking new ground, and he would try and see if any of that was going to be useful to him and storytelling and ideas that he could introduce into the story. So, in that sense, it’s very well researched, you know.
Jared Harris Has the Same Question as You After the Season 3 Finale

“They know what they’re doing in terms of the narrative strands and the questions they want to leave you with.”

What do you think fans are going to say and think after they’ve seen the Season 3 finale? HARRIS: I’ll sit there and then probably start going, which a lot of you guys are going, “Is there going to be a Season 4,” and blah, blah, blah. I’m not sure. I can’t answer that question without giving anything away. Listen, these guys know how to tell a story, and they know what they’re doing in terms of the narrative strands and the questions they want to leave you with. So, I don’t want to say too much more about it. I already know I need more. I need people watching Season 3 so I can get more myself. So, I would imagine as an actor, during the making of any series or movie, there’s always going to be a scene or sequence that’s a little more challenging to film than another. During the making of Foundation in the three seasons, was there a scene or sequence that ended up being a little bit more challenging? HARRIS: Well, being drowned was quite… That was pretty unpleasant. It was like being water-boarded or something. Obviously, it wasn’t as severe as that, but that was actually an unpleasant thing to do. In this season, the Hari that we discover in Episode 2, there’s a lot of prosthetics involved. That’s always a test of one’s patience sitting in that chair, going through all of the processes, the makeup tests, and everything. Very challenging, huge, big scenes where you’re telling a lot of story and narrative and exposition. That’s a challenge from the point of view of, are you able to keep the audience up to where they need to be in that story, so they don’t start drifting off, and it just seems like a lot of words? Completely. Well, your character has to be mysterious, but also deliver exposition.
The Scripts Are Constantly Evolving on ‘Foundation’

Asking questions during reads means that the answers sometimes get worked into the scripts.

Image via Apple TV+

One of the things that was interesting about Season 3 and the making of Season 3 is that you were filming for a little while, then it got shut down because of the strikes. Then you went back and continued filming, which is obviously way different than the way it was supposed to be. Did the scripts change as a result of the strikes? Did they make any changes because they were watching the footage, and they were like, “We can tweak this and this will be better?” HARRIS: You’d have to talk to the writers and the showrunners about that. But the scripts are changing all the time because once you get on set, once you’re there and you’re starting to see you’re going to have to deal with the specific questions around scenes that you’re going to shoot, you have dialogue with the writers. You sit down, and you’ll do a table read of the scenes. Then you’ll rehearse the scenes. It’s always tweaking. They’re very generous in that they invite comments from us, and we sit, and we chat to them, and we tell them what our reactions are to the material, what our thoughts are. Then we start off with questions. The answers to some of those questions sometimes make their way into the scripts. Sometimes things that they realize, “Well, this isn’t working, let’s try it a different way.” You can pitch solutions to them. So, it’s constantly evolving in that sense. It’s been tweaked in that sense. There are no radical shifts that are going on, but it’s been tweaked. But I actually hadn’t started filming yet before the strikes happened; I was just about to set off to go start when that happened. Foundation Season 3 debuts on July 11 on AppleTV+.

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