See is the new series set to launch AppleTV+ tomorrow, an epic of extraordinary proportions with a $15 million per episode budget bound to blow up in a big way.
Starring Jason Momoa and Alfre Woodard, See jumps 400 years to the future following a virus which has wiped out most of mankind with just 2 million survivors, who emerged from the devastation without their sight. Actually, vision is a herecal myth until two children are born with the ability to see.
Momoa stars as Baba Voss, the leader of a primal community – the Alkeny – who fathers twins that become a prime target from enemy vultures, circling for prey.
It’s a spectacle from start to finish. From the break-taking scenery to the first battle sequences worthy to be muttered in the same breath as Game of Thrones. But, much like the show which turned Momoa into a household name, shooting the ambitious massacres was no easy feat – even if the long days of filming under extreme conditions clearly paid off.
But that’s not all. The entire cast – extras and all – had to endure weeks of ‘blind training’ to ensure at no point the viewer could forget that while slicing, dicing and making their way through perilous obstacles, Vass and his army are going in without any concept of sight whatsoever.
Metro.co.uk sat down with Momoa and Woodard, who stars as mysterious midwife Paris, where they revealed the extreme brutality behind filming such a challenging project.
‘We used sleep shades and a guy called Joe Stretche, who is not an actor but he is very out at the front and up front in the movement for the blindness community in the States,’ Woodard explained.
‘What we did was we trained for a month – the warriors, the tribesman – we were taught how to use a stick, we turned them in to staffs. It was how to navigate the world and the language that people use the same you would for any other film if there was a dialect or a language.
‘People spent five or six hours in the sleep shade, I couldn’t do it. I got overwhelmed in 20 minutes. I’d either start laughing or I’d start weeping because my hearing is very acute and my sense of smell so to take that it really heightened the other senses.’
‘It was a sensory overload,’ added Momoa.
‘We’d work though it, everybody would have to come up with a way.’
However, after all that Woodard she was ‘disappointed’ to watch the show back and realise her eyes had been given the CGI treatment anyway.
‘You look around at different people, and everybody’s blindness was different,’ she said.
‘It was cool watching it with our co-stars because when you’re filming it you can’t really look,’ which proved slightly problematic on set, revealed Momoa.
‘You can’t look at anyone in the eyes.’
But keeping up their blindness was only a slice of the struggle. The Game of Thrones cast moaned of the long nights filming battles – which, coincidentally, viewers complained were too dark to see anyway – and they didn’t have the added weight of nailing the expertly choreographed routines without being able to even take a glimpse at each other.
‘That was hellish because of the rain and the mud and you’re not able to look at people so that s**t’s real,’ Momoa stressed.
‘It was days, it was brutal. That was tough.’
But the struggle paid off. And after reading the script from Steven Knight (the mind behind Peaky Blinders) there was nothing which was going to stand in Momoa and Woodard’s way.
‘I was in Cornwall and I was coming up to London for Frontier,’ recalled Momoa. ‘They sent me the script, I read it out loud to my buddies and we all flipped because they’ve been with me my whole life and they freaked out and also Jamie Sives, who I was in Game of Thrones with, and my dad – I was with a solid group and they were so excited for me.
‘I’ve never had anything that good sent to me. It usually goes through so many actors before it gets to me – but it was so perfectly cast, the savage primal thing but then it turns into this beautiful father role.’
Woodard had the same enthusiasm.
‘I remember thinking, “I just wanted to be in this because I just wanted to be in this world.” I was like, “ok, I’ve got to play Paris,” she told us.
See is available to stream on AppleTV+ from Friday November 1. Read our review here.
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