From the mind of Joe Barton (The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself) Sky’s action-packed series, The Lazarus Project, is back this November for Season Two for more time-loop excitement.

Check out the first look trailer here…

In The Lazarus Project S2, the world locks into a never-ending time loop that will ultimately end with the planet’s complete extinction, which means the Lazarus team must race against time to find a solution before humanity is wiped out forever. Among their number is resolute Lazarus agent, George, who’s been left in disgrace after betraying the organisation in the name of love.

George is determined to redeem himself and win back the trust of his friends, colleagues, and the love of his life. But when he discovers that the cause he’s fighting is more sinister than it appears, George begins to suspect that the only person he can really trust is himself.

Created and written by Joe Barton, the eight-part series stars Pappa Essiedu (I May Destroy You), Anjli Mohindra (The Sarah Jane Adventures), Charly Clive (All My Friends Hate Me), Vinette Robinson (Code 404), Rudi Dharmalingam (Wakefield), Caroline Quentin (Dickensian) and Tom Burke (The Wonder) all reprising their roles.

Also joining the cast in the upcoming second series are Royce Pierreson (The Witcher), Colin Salmon (Resident Evil, Limitless), Safia Oakley-Green (Extraordinary), Lorne MacFayden (Vigil), Zoe Telford (Genius), Sam Troughton (The Ritual) and James Atherton (Hollyoaks).

The Lazarus Project S2 will be available on Sky Max and streaming service NOW this November.

Watch more trailers at SciFiNow

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That is, until he meets Archie (Anjili Mohindra), who recruits George (Paapa Essiedu, above) for the Lazarus Project – a secret organisation that has harnessed the ability to turn back time every time the world is at threat of extinction. Like George, those who work at Lazarus are the few people on earth with the ability to remember the events that are undone when time goes back.

Alongside colleagues Archie, standoffish Shiv (Rudi Dharmalingam), and their steely leader Wes (Caroline Quentin), George works to prevent global catastrophe – including trying to track down the formidable Rebrov (Tom Burke), a wanted criminal intent on detonating a nuclear warhead and destroying the world…

We sat down with the stars of the series Charly Clive, Rudi Dharmalingam and Anjili Mohindra to find out more about the time-loop show…

What can audiences expect from The Lazarus Project?

Anjli Mohindra: It asks questions about humanity and our choices and our responsibility and pushes the debate of altruism versus egoism. Our director Marco [Kreuzpaintner] put it really brilliantly when he said: ‘It really questions those themes in a time where we value society more than the individual’.

What did you think when you first read Joe Barton’s script?

Charly Clive: We all are really big Joe Barton fans. It’s sort of a Joe Barton fan club within the cast! So when I first read the script, I actually read my audition sides, I didn’t have a full script. So my idea of the show was quite a romantic show about this couple figuring things out and then when I read the first script, I was like ‘oh, this is a crazy show about time travel and espionage’ [haha]!

So I think that the fact that I could, from a few scenes, think ‘oh, this is a really human piece about people getting on with their lives and trying to make their late 20s, early 30s work best for them’. That is a testament to Joe’s writing that it’s actually an enormous piece about so many different things and so many different, really human, sometimes quite tragic, dramatic stories within the framework of this larger-than-life time travel concept is amazing. Reading it is slightly mind-blowing. But I did think it’s going to make a great TV show!

The Lazarus Project isn’t the typical 24-hour time loop premise, what can you tell us about the rules of the series?

Rudi Dharmalingam: So essentially, the Lazarus Project are a very select group of individuals who have been cherry-picked due to their extraordinary skill set and abilities. They’ve been charged with the sole mission of saving the planet from destruction and catastrophe. In order to do that, we tap into the genre of science fiction, which I’m a big fan of.

Basically the Lazarus Project have a capability which means that they can re-set time by manipulating what we call a singularity, which is a single point in time and space where the fabric of time can be manipulated. Which involves black holes and quantum mechanics and string theory and all kinds of other things which are completely over our heads. So we were perpetually in a state of confusion!

So when a catastrophe is about to happen, we have the ability to re-set time and we go back up to one year, and the checkpoint day is the 1 July every year. So if the world is about to end on the 3 July, then we can reset time but we can only go back two days. So we go back to 1 July. Alternatively, if the world is about to end on the 13 June, then we go back to the 1 July the previous year. So they’re the rules of the game.

It’s full of action. It’s full of heart and drama and love and humanity. Our planet is so incredibly precious to us and at the moment we’re facing this terrible threat of climate change, amongst other things, and your ability to play God I think is a big moral dilemma. Is it worth playing God for the sake of the survival of the planet?

The show deals with some deep themes like death and grief. What is it about genre that makes it a good platform to explore such subjects?

Rudi Dharmalingam: Well, I think if I can just expand on that, I think there’s something quite Greek about the show as well. In The Iliad, Agamemnon had this moral dilemma as to whether he should be sacrificing someone close to him in order to save millions of people’s lives. What we find in The Lazarus Project, is the same scenario whereby we have this seemingly ordinary guy – albeit he’s not a king like Agamemnon – but he’s still faced with the same dilemma: Do I sacrifice someone that I hold dear to me, for the sake of the survival of the planet and for the sake of millions of people’s lives? It’s ‘what would you do in that situation?’ So I think there’s something quite classically Greek about the show.

Anjli Mohindra: With sci-fi, I think you can also ask bigger questions because you can explore things metaphorically. So we think we’re just asking about a time machine but actually we’re asking about responsibility and humanity and morality. With other shows where you meet other life from different planets, you’re asking questions about prejudice and integration and equality. So I think that’s what the love for science fiction is for me and I think a lot of the people that write it, that you can explore things in a Trojan Horse kind of way where we think we’re watching one thing, but there’s something else going on at the same time.

There’s a lot of humour in The Lazarus Project as well. How would you describe the vibe of the show?

Anjli Mohindra: I think it’s quite a refreshing sci-fi piece, in that it’s still quite cheeky and wry, and there’s plenty of humour but at the same time it is very grounded. You’ve got performances from incredible actors like Vinette Robinson and Tom Burke and Paapa Essiedu, who are very great at doing drama and playing grittier characters. I think that’s what’s so good about this piece, it’s just layered with so much variety.

There have been quite a lot of time-loop shows and TV series, what makes The Lazarus Project stand out against those?

Charly Clive: Something I really love about the show is it’s set in England largely. There’s something really nice about how British people deal with extreme things and that speaks to the humour slightly as well. I think that is why the show has a good sense of humour – Joe writes with a tone of total realism and people are cracking jokes defensively or being slightly awkward with their conversation. I don’t think you get [that] with a lot of really slick American sci-fi stuff, which I’m also a fan of, but I think that this is asking the huge question of, what happens if time travel is a possibility and using it for good and potentially using it for bad? That’s an enormous question and when it’s posed by people who you can really relate to, I think that is such an interesting ‘in’ to a story like this. I feel like even if you are somebody that might be put off by sci-fi, or put off by the idea of this enormous concept of time travel, these are really grounded and hopefully very relatable characters. I think that is what stands it apart.

What can you tell us about the secret organisation running The Lazarus Project?

Rudi Dharmalingam: So we are a top secret organisation, but we’re a top secret organisation comprised of individuals with a very extraordinary skill set. So basically, the majority of the people within the organisation have been given the ability to sense the time jumps and that has been manufactured through medicine essentially. That’s not dissimilar to the way we live our lives now, I think. I mean, you could argue that we’ve been playing God with vaccines and antibiotics and any form of modern medicine. So I think we’ve probably been playing God for a very long time. But we’ve been cherry picked because of our extraordinary skill set.

But some of us, i.e. [my character] have been born with the ability to sense the time jumps. So basically, I’m a mutant! I play a mutant. Which was never the plan. I wanted to do Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, and now I’m an action superhero, which is really bizarre [haha!].

What do you want for audiences to take away from the series?

Rudi Dharmalingam: I think it’s first and foremost, what would you do? What would you do if you were in that situation? If you were faced with that moral dilemma of saving someone that you hold most dear to you, or letting nature take its course. It’s a really tough one. It’s really difficult.

Charly Clive: I hope that people have lots of theories about what is going to happen at the end and then they absolutely cannot predict what does happen. I hope that when the credits roll, they’re like, ‘Whaaat?’ I think that would be nice. I feel like that’s essentially how a lot of us felt about reading the scripts!

Anjli Mohindra: Yeah, that little mind-blown emoji. That’s what I hope the nation is full of!

The Lazarus Project is out now on Sky and Now TV 🤯

The post “It is slightly mind-blowing!”: The Lazarus Project stars tell us about the time-loop sci-fi series appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

That is, until he meets Archie, who recruits George (Paapa Essiedu, above) for the Lazarus Project – a secret organisation that has harnessed the ability to turn back time every time the world is at threat of extinction. Like George, those who work at Lazarus are the few people on earth with the ability to remember the events that are undone when time goes back.

Alongside colleagues Archie (Anjli Mohindra), standoffish Shiv (Rudi Dharmalingam), and their steely leader Wes (Caroline Quentin), George works to prevent global catastrophe – including trying to track down the formidable Rebrov (Tom Burke), a wanted criminal intent on detonating a nuclear warhead and destroying the world…

We sat down with writer Joe Barton to discuss time loops, secret government agencies and how he predicted the future…

When did you first get the idea for The Lazarus Project?

I’d been reading articles about things like the Cuban Missile Crisis and BuzzFeed articles like ’10 times the world almost accidentally destroyed itself’. I don’t know why I was reading these things, maybe I just like to panic myself? But, how close we’ve come to nuclear disaster and all this stuff. It just struck me as weird in a way that we hadn’t accidentally completely annihilated our own planet (although, I mean, maybe we are slowly with the environment), but in a more immediate sense.

So I guess the idea came from exploring that idea. It seems so unlikely that we as a species hadn’t accidentally killed ourselves already… So what if it had happened and there was a secret society that was put together to undo these massive extinction events?

Then the time travel element came into it… I guess it was an excuse to do a time loop show which I’ve always wanted to do, and to try and come up with new rules and new ways of doing time travel and time loops.

Did you look to any other time-loop projects for inspiration?

Groundhog Day is a classic and I like Live Die, Repeat, Edge of Tomorrow. Those are the main ones. Also Source Code was there. It wasn’t one specific thing but it’s more about taking different elements from ones that interested me. Taking the darkness of Groundhog Day and the suicidal nature or the action beats from Edge of Tomorrow and just putting it all into a big mixer.

Recently, there’s been stuff like Palm Springs, which has been great. There are loads of them and they’ve all got some interesting little elements to them.

The Lazarus Project differs from the usual 24-hour time loop and is instead a variable – why did you go down that route?

I liked the idea that it was a variable, and that there was a time limit on it. The point of the Lazarus Project is that something bad has happened, and they want to undo it. But you have to put restrictions on that idea. The most they can go back is a year.

I think big part of it was because the crux of the show is that George wants time to go back to save one person. But they only turn back time to save the planet. It’s that idea of, is one person’s life important? Or are billions of people’s lives more important? Is one person worth turning back time for?

So he only has a year in which to turn back time and I think that with all of these stories, it’s all about the restrictions you put on the character because if they can just turn back time whenever and at any point they want, then they live in a world of endless possibilities. Nothing matters. But if there are rules and a structure to it, then you create more drama.

There are some real tragedies in The Lazarus Project, was it important to you include the darker elements of time travel?

Yeah, it was all about: What are the downsides of time travel? Because there’s lots of fun. You can have loads of fun with it, they do car chases and explosions and everyone loves that but then it was like, well, actually, what are the realities if you turn back time, even a week?

There are billions of people on the planet and if you turn back your life, even a month or two months, what would you lose or what would change? If you met your partner two weeks ago, and then you turn back time three weeks, would you still meet that person?

We’re constantly making these decisions in our lives that we don’t even know about. I might hesitate when I’m crossing the road, and that means that I won’t bump into so and so, which means I won’t go here or there. But the whole journey of your life can be completely hanging on tiny little moments. It seemed like a fascinating idea about actually, what are the huge negative repercussions of turning back time on people even if they’re not aware of it? Is it still morally dubious to do?

There are plenty of time lines in the show, that sometimes overlap and cross each other – how did you keep on track with it all?

With difficulty! I’m a very unorganised person and I never quite appreciated just how complicated it would be. We definitely lost track of it at times. I think even to the point where we’d filmed stuff, and we were in the edit room and we were like ‘wait a minute, this doesn’t make sense. We have to change this’ [haha]!

If we get a second series, one of the things I absolutely will do is do a corkboard chart like Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s mind map.

The Lazarus Project is managed by a secret government organisation, what can you tell us about this group and their relationship with each other?

I liked the idea that it’s kind of a gang show. It’s the tone of the show as well – one of the things we wanted to do with the Lazarus Project was that it’s a big sci-fi organisation that does these incredible things, but it’s also a place of work. In the scripts there was all this stuff about wanting to get details about their office like, where do they make the tea? Where are the toilets? It’s a workplace, they squabble, they go for karaoke and drinks and stuff like that.

So we wanted to build out these interesting, slightly acerbic, irreverent characters. There’s also a bit of a divide in them because you have the ones who organically, like George, mutated to be able to experience time loops and you have the ones who were chosen specifically. You have Archie or Greta – these people who were very skilled and were chosen. Then you have people like George who just developed this ability organically. So George is essentially a guy who’s a normal who finds himself working for this super organisation and it’s just fun to play with that idea of how he basically feels slightly inadequate!

The Lazarus Project is only actioned when the end of the world is imminent – how did you come up with the different ideas to destroy the world?

Part of it was sitting down and working out the different ways of doing it. Obviously, nuclear war was the obvious one and there aren’t there aren’t a huge amount of variations. So that’s why we have a pandemic in the first episode. Which then came true, obviously, by the time we filmed it, which is unfortunate.

Wait, did you write the show before the Covid-19 pandemic?

Yeah we did! There was that and then there was a lot of stuff about Ukraine and Russia as well in the show originally, which we then had to change.

The problem with the show is it’s a very dark world at the moment and you’re dealing with these big existential threats and you want it to feel realistic, but also everyone’s obviously sensitive to that because it feels like a dangerous planet, right now. So it’s kind of walking that line between escapism and being depressing.

That’s pretty weird that you included a pandemic and a conflict between Russia and Ukraine before both of them happened…

Yeah, weird. All the actors were looking at me like ‘what did you know?’ and like ‘what else is gonna happen?!’.

I don’t think any of these ideas were that outlandish, that’s sort of scary. If you’ve been paying attention over the last 5-10 years, this kind of stuff was always gonna potentially happen. It’s just unfortunate that it’s still happening to us now.

How did you maintain the balance of action, sci-fi and humour in the show?

I think it’s just going where it feels like the story needs to go. We always had an eye on the fact that it’s an action show. So we should have the spectacle in it whenever we can. And the first episode, there should be a big chase.

Then we gave ourselves permission to try and be flexible. I think that the tone of the show is one in that you can have quite a lot of humour, but you can also have really dark stuff as well. And you can have these big action set pieces. It’s quite a fine line, it’s a balancing act. Not every show can do that, but I think if you go in with the intention of this is the show, the lead character can sing ‘The End of the World’ in karaoke, at the same time as you can have, “what would happen if a baby was undone by time travel?”.

It’s difficult. You can’t have them at the same time but you can if you’re careful and if you take care over the plotting. The peaks and troughs of audience emotion is there to be mined. You just have to be delicate with it.

What do you want audiences to take away from the series?

Purely I want people to be entertained by it. That was the fundamental thing.

I think you can watch it on a surface level of ‘here are the stakes, is he going to achieve the things he’s got to achieve? Is the hero going to win the day? Is the world going to be saved?’ All of this stuff, but if people want to, I think there are deeper moral and philosophical questions about the nature of morality and that big question of: What would you do? Do you think that one life is worth altering the course of everyone else on the planet just to save? Or do you think that actually you can’t turn back time to save one person?

There’s big conundrums that the characters go through and I guess it’d be nice if people watched it and were like ‘oh, shit, what would I do in that in that situation?’ Or they might just like the car chases, and that’s fine, too!

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New time-jumping thriller The Lazarus Project is due to hit our screens this June but before then, we’ve been given a sneak peek into the eight-part series with a brand new clip!

Featuring an exciting car chase, check out the clip here…

The Lazarus Project follows George who wakes up one day and finds himself reliving a day from months ago. He thinks he’s lost his mind. All of his recent milestones have been undone, including his success at work and his marriage to the love of his life Sarah. Worst of all, he seems to be the only one who has noticed what’s happened.

That is, until he meets Archie, who recruits George for the Lazarus Project – a secret organisation that has harnessed the ability to turn back time every time the world is at threat of extinction. Like George, those who work at Lazarus are the few people on earth with the ability to remember the events that are undone when time goes back. Alongside colleagues Archie, standoffish Shiv, and their steely leader Wes, George works to prevent global catastrophe – including trying to track down the formidable Rebrov, a wanted criminal intent on detonating a nuclear warhead and destroying the world.

The Lazarus Project will air on Sky Max and NOW on 16 June, 2022. Check out more clips at the SciFiNow YouTube channel.

The post The Lazarus Project: Release date and new clip revealed for time-hopping thriller appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

A secret organization is able to turn back time when there’s an extinction threat in The Lazarus Project, a new eight-part action thriller from acclaimed writer Joe Barton (Giri/Haji).

Check out the trailer…

The Lazarus Project follows George who wakes up one day and finds himself reliving a day from months ago. He thinks he’s lost his mind. All of his recent milestones have been undone, including his success at work and his marriage to the love of his life Sarah. Worst of all, he seems to be the only one who has noticed what’s happened.

That is, until he meets Archie, who recruits George for the Lazarus Project – a secret organisation that has harnessed the ability to turn back time every time the world is at threat of extinction. Like George, those who work at Lazarus are the few people on earth with the ability to remember the events that are undone when time goes back. Alongside colleagues Archie, standoffish Shiv (Dharmalingam), and their steely leader Wes (Quentin) George works to prevent global catastrophe – including trying to track down the formidable Rebrov (Burke,), a wanted criminal intent on detonating a nuclear warhead and destroying the world.

Then a freak accident harms someone close to George. Lazarus won’t let him turn back time to undo it – unless there is the threat of global extinction. Now George must choose to stay loyal or go rogue, as he is faced with the question: if you had the power to rewrite your past, what would you sacrifice to do it…?

The Lazarus Project is directed by Marco Kreuzpaintner and stars Paapa Essiedu (I May Destroy You), Anjli Mohindra (Vigil), Tom Burke (The Show), Caroline Quentin (Bridgerton), Rudi Dharmalingam (Wakefield) and Charly Clive (Pure).

The Lazarus Project will air on Sky Max and NOW in April 2022.

The post The Lazarus Project: First look at time-jumping thriller appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.