Gallery Link:
– 1.01 – Santa Muerte
Gallery Link:
– Promotional Photoshoot
Gallery Link:
– Promotional Posters
Natalie Dormer loves a challenge. The actress who broke the period drama mould when she burst onto screens as Anne Boleyn in The Tudors and slayed Game of Thrones as Margaery Tyrell is back with Sky Atlantic’s new show, Penny Dreadful: City of Angles, and she doesn’t just play one character, she plays FOUR.
Set in 1938 Los Angeles with swirling racial tension, the first of these characters is Magda, a shape shifting demon who has a penchant for causing maximum chaos wherever she goes. The resulting chaos causes a race war and the show could not be more apt for the times we find ourselves in right now. That is the power of this story – it will provoke conversation.
Here, Natalie discusses the meanings behind the show, her faith in her physicality and finding her voice with age…
You are fierce with a capital F in this. The fact you play four of these formidable characters is incredible. How much of an amazing experience was it to find a script and a project like this for you?
I mean one of the reasons I said yes was because how many times am I going to be offered to play four roles in one gig? And it is quite a bit of range for fun, have some playtime in the dressing up box with voices, physicality and the whole characterisation. So that was obviously one of the main attractions that made me want to take the job. It’s a good bit piece of gymnastic exercise because you need to sort of flex your muscle and ask yourself, ‘can I do this?
TheWrap Emmy magazine: “Ordinarily I would stay in an American accent entire time — but in this job is there was no point in that, because I was jumping around so much,” the British actress says
If Natalie Dormer did nothing in “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels” but play the dark goddess Magda, the British actress would have had a juicy role as a supernatural force intent on pushing the human race into turmoil in 1930s Los Angeles. But one of Magda’s special powers is that she can assume any form she wishes — so in addition to appearing on screen as Magda, Dormer also gets to play three of her human iterations in the mousy but scheming political aide Alex, the German-American housewife Elsa and the zoot-suited gang leader Rio.
“For any actor, I think your ears prick up when you get offered the chance to play four roles for the price of one — how many times is that going to happen in your career?” Dormer said of her reaction when she got the script from creator John Logan. “I was intrigued by it, and excited by the idea of this workout both physically and mentally.”
But when she was working out how she’d play Magda’s three human forms, “Game of Thrones” vet Dormer said she didn’t dwell on the fact that they were all versions of the goddess. “I came at the iterations from a very technical perspective, because I wanted give them clear lines of identity — physicality and voice and accent and so forth,” she said. “But when it comes to psychology, John and I realized very quickly that the only way to play Elsa, Alex and Rio is as fleshed-out human individuals. You don’t get that wink at the camera, because we found it undermined the scenes that those individuals are in.”
The original Penny Dreadful was a series about monsters, mostly of the literal variety, featuring stories about witches, werewolves and other dark creatures right alongside real-life versions of Victor Frankenstein and Dorian Gray. Its sequel series, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, tells a similarly dark tale, but chooses to set its story in a land filled with sunshine, a world whose monsters wear beautiful fashions and bright surfaces often cover rot underneath.
At the center of this beautiful, complicated mess sits Magda (Natalie Dormer), a shape-shifting demon whose love of chaos and violence appears to be as rooted in the joy of breaking things and making messes she doesn’t have to clean up as it does any hard and firm spiritual guidelines.
“There will come a time when the world is ready for me,” Magda intones in the series’ opening moments, predicting a dark and dire future for humanity that involves global conflict and fratricide.
The world she’s referring to is 1930s Los Angeles, which teeters on the verge of tearing itself to pieces as a race war bubbles in the streets and fascists creep toward positions of governmental authority. But in the larger world of our television landscape, her presence makes a similarly outsized impact from her very first scenes.
Magda, it would appear, is not here to punish or destroy so much as to illuminate, to sow the seeds of chaos that might prove to her reclusive holy sister Santa Muerte that humanity is unworthy of her. Why? Well, we don’t entirely know. But in every folklore, aren’t there always divine beings who are simultaneously symbiotic partners and rivals, who dance around their hatred for and need of one another for all eternity? Given that Santa Muerte, to date, hasn’t seemed terribly interested in diverting her sister’s quite literal highway to hell, it seems safe to assume that’s in some way what’s happening here.
Gallery Links:
– Promotional Posters
– 1.01
Meet the human forms of shape-shifting demon Magda.
When EW spoke with Natalie Dormer last year to get the goods on her new role… well, roles in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, the Game of Thrones vet promised Magda, her shape-shifting demon persona, will take three different guises that she’ll use to manipulate humankind in 1938 Los Angeles. “The audience will discover who those identities are as they continue to watch the show,” she said at the time.
In a brand-new sneak peek, which EW can exclusively debut, we see these different forms and learn more about how she’ll use them over the course of season 1.
First things first, this is not Penny Dreadful season 4. City of Angels is more a “spiritual descendant,” as creator John Logan once put it, to the original series, which placed actress Eva Green in a gothic London setting.
“The continuity from the first iteration of Penny Dreadful to this one is the supernatural element in which monsters are present but the main monsters are within the characters,” explains Rory Kinnear, who played Frankenstein’s monster in the original and now returns as a German Nazi living in America as a physician.
Magda is what makes City of Angels a Penny Dreadful story.
As the sister of Santa Muerte (Lorenza Izzo), who is the Holy Angel of Death and ferry woman of souls to the afterlife, she is an agent of chaos who believes humankind is inherently evil — and she’ll use her changeling powers to prove that point. The video, shown above, sees Magda taking on various forms as she speaks of a “time when nation will battle nation, when race will devour race, when brother will kill brother.”
At the center of it all is Tiago Vega, played by Here & Now‘s Daniel Zovatto. The first chicano police detective on the L.A.P.D. force, Tiago works to solve a case seemingly linked to Día de Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations, while the planned construction of L.A.’s Arroyo Seco Parkway threatens to displace his family and neighborhood. Zovatto calls it “a roller coaster of emotions” as Tiago grapples with racism, Nazism, police brutality, and demagoguery.
“It’s intense,” he says. “I mean, it is dreadful.”
Penny Dreadful: City of Angels — also starring Nathan Lane as a Jewish detective and a mentor figure for Tiago — premieres this April 26 on Showtime.
Watch in higher resolution in the video archive.
Murder, Los Angeles, Satan, the Third Reich, anti-Mexican bigotry, an Aimee Semple McPherson-style evangelist and Nathan Lane with a Tommy gun – the new trailer for Showtime’s Penny Dreadful: City of Angels packs quite the wallop.
Billed as a “spiritual descendant of the original Penny Dreadful story,” the new series, kicking off next month and mixing historical reality with the supernatural, opens in 1938 Los Angeles with a grisly murder shocking the city (we see the mutilated, Joker-looking corpse in the trailer). Detective Tiago Vega (Daniel Zovatto) and his partner Lewis Michener (Nathan Lane) investigate the crime, getting drawn into a tale that encompasses the building of L.A.’s first freeways, the city’s traditions of Mexican-American folklore, Nazi espionage, and the rise of radio evangelism. Before long, Vega and his family “are grappling with powerful forces that threaten to tear them apart.”
In addition to Zovatto (Here and Now) and Lane, the new Penny Dreadful stars Natalie Dormer, Kerry Bishé, Rory Kinnear, Adriana Barraza, Michael Gladis, Jessica Garza and Johnathan Nieves. Tony winner (for Red) and three-time Oscar nominee John Logan, the creator, writer and executive producer of the original Penny Dreadful, continues in those same roles. Michael Aguilar serves as executive producer, along with Sam Mendes and Pippa Harris, both of Neal Street Productions. Logan’s Desert Wolf Productions produces, and James Bagley serves as co-executive producer.
Penny Dreadful: City of Angels premieres Sunday, April 26 at 10/9c on Showtime.
Watch in higher resolution in the video archive.
