There is no trailer on the boat. This is the reality that Toby Stevens faced while filming Hulu’s new drama, The Season, about the misdeeds of Hong Kong’s sailing elite. The show, almost intentionally, didn’t give its cast anywhere to hide.
“Usually during filming, I can go back there and doze off a little bit at lunchtime,” Stevens says with the weary fondness of a reconciled man. Instead, he meditated on deck. His castmates photographed him doing so. Apparently there was a sitar soundtrack.
6 episodes. Fifty days. It’s humid, floating, and unforgiving. And by all accounts, it was a truly wonderful time.
“We had a really fun cast, which made everything so much easier,” says Karina Lamb, who plays Fiona Hext. Jessie Mei Lee, who plays the resolutely British yet American Cora, agrees. “We only need each other to get through it. And my staff and I laughed a lot.”
The warmth is real, but so is the skill that went into creating “The Season.” The show, released all six episodes at once on Hulu on June 17, was produced by PCCW Media and SK Global, filmed almost entirely on real Hong Kong locations, and built around a cast that spent most of its production at sea.
For Lam, the challenge was language. She has been acting in Cantonese and Mandarin for 25 years, started her career in Hong Kong, built a parallel life as a singer in Taiwan, and was born and raised in Canada. And he describes himself as a hybrid in the literal sense of the word. “I dream in Chinese,” she says. It turns out that English fluency and English acting are completely different muscles. “Some things can only be expressed in Cantonese,” she says. Chinese ambiguities, meanings that get trapped in the spaces between words, make translation difficult.
Mei Li had the opposite problem. Playing an American in a production staffed by Australian, British, Chilean and Hispanic directors, her brain continued to rebel. “I like to fit in when I’m talking to someone, so I tend to imitate them,” she says. My accent started to drop. “Sometimes my accent would come through. I’d be talking to Chris and then suddenly in one scene I’d say something that sounded like an Australian.”
Chris Pang was struggling with a problem even more thorny than phonetics. His character, Andrew Fong, is portrayed as comically hilarious and disgustingly obnoxious. The question was whether the audience would stick with him. “Andrew is an unabashed, unapologetically asshole,” Pan says. “He just says the weirdest, most horrifying things, and it becomes a mission to find that balance where you say these things and still love this guy.” His goal, he says, is “something you can’t help but love even though he’s an asshole.” He says his coach, Marialie Rivas, encouraged him to push beyond what he thought was wise. He regularly pushed himself too hard. “Marially gave me a take and was like, just go all out. And I overdid it. I was like, well, okay, we’re not going to use it.”
Stevens plays Christopher Hext, a patriarch and power broker who wears his wealth like armor, but longs for something quieter. The danger with a character like this, he says, is that the archetype becomes flat. “Sometimes the characters come across as kind of anti-social, one-dimensional, evil rich people.” What interested him was the gap between the performance of power and what exists beneath it. “They’re all wearing masks. They’re all spouting that I’m rich, I’m powerful, I have this position, but behind the scenes they’re all scared people. They’re feeling all these things.”
Perhaps this is also a depiction of Hong Kong itself, a city that shows one face but contains many elements. All four cast members, unprompted, return to the idea of the city as more than a backdrop. “Hong Kong seems to be a personality unto itself,” Lam says. She has shot dozens of films here, but the use of real locations and an outside lens allows her to see the film differently. “I’ve shot so many Hong Kong-produced films here, but I’ve never shot like this with a lens like this.”
Maylie goes further. The show moves between the glittering marina set of the ultra-rich and the more down-to-earth life worlds of the characters outside of that orbit, and the city absorbs both. “It’s not just that we filmed in Hong Kong. This show seems to be about Hong Kong in many ways,” Stevens characteristically interjects, “This show can only take place in Hong Kong.”
The series is created and show-executed by Yarun Tu, with Marialie Rivas serving as lead director and executive producer. The film is produced by PCCW Media in association with SK Global, the makers of “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Thai Cave Rescue,” and “Delhi Crime.” International sales will be handled by Fremantle with support from De Maio Entertainment. In addition to Hulu, the series is available to stream on Viu in Asia, the Middle East and South Africa, and on Now TV in Hong Kong.
What happens next is that Stevens is back in England for a period drama about two fugitive nuns during the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, which he calls “Thelma and Louise of the Tudors” – titled The Reformation of Mother Agnes. Pan is helmed by director Jane Woo, who is currently writing a crime thriller titled Brother Gangster (“I think that needs to change,” he says). May Li heads to London’s Soho Theater this summer for the four-person comedy Tender, written by Dave Harris. This is my second time on stage. “That’s a little different,” she says. Lam is set to begin filming the project with a Malaysian director in September, but details have not been disclosed.
All four of us moved on to other projects, other cities, other worlds. But Hong Kong has a way of drawing people back.
