When the stars and creative team behind HBO’s new genre hit, Westworld, gathered in front of a packed house at the Dolby Theatre for a PaleyFest panel Saturday night, they were, as you might expect, tight-lipped. Not even moderator Jeff Jensen could wheedle many hints or details about the upcoming Season 2—beyond getting co-creator Lisa Joy Nolan to admit that they’d likely start filming this summer. But even as the Westworld crew remained smilingly cagey about upcoming details of their famously mysterious show, there wasn’t a trace of antagonism. In other words, when it comes to spoiler culture, Westworld could teach its HBO brethren a lesson or two.
Citing the first four or five seasons of Game of Thrones as an example, Lisa Joy pointed out that the show’s success wasn’t dampened in the slightest by thousands (millions?) of A Song of Ice and Fire book readers knowing almost every turn of the plot in advance. “Knowing the ending,” she said with a smile, ”doesn’t ruin the journey.” Her husband, meanwhile, was cracking jokes about the nimble minds over at Reddit throughout the panel. When asked about some of the unanswered questions from Season 1 (particularly whether Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores had achieved free will), Jonathan Nolan smirked: “I’m waiting for the message boards on Reddit to tell us.”
There seemed to be an awareness, throughout the Westworld panel, that there are several ways to watch a TV show—spoiled or no, binged or week by week—and that there’s no consensus on what the right way should be. In fact, Thandie Newton (Maeve) observed that the Westworld viewers who obsessively comb through online commentary are very likely in the minority and the larger team acknowledged that with some judicious navigation of social media, there’s usually a choice when it comes to degree of spoilage. The actors themselves waged their own kind of spoiler war while filming the first season of the show. Because they were kept almost entirely in the dark about the various twists and reveals the Nolans had written out, the cast was split between those determined to figure the mystery out and those content to go with the flow.
“I had a backstory for my guy for three or four episodes and then I threw that out the window,” Ed Harris (the Man in Black) said of simply letting Westworld take him on a journey of self-discovery. James Marsden (Teddy, R.I.P.) also preferred being kept in the dark and admitted that he thinks that’s the better way for audiences to enjoy the show—though he was careful to add that this was just an opinion.
Meanwhile, scene-partners-in-crime Evan Rachel Wood and Jimmi Simpson (William) were having fun playing detective. As Simpson told Vanity Fair in advance of the Season 1 finale, a simple, early request from the show’s makeup artist helped him figure out before anyone else in the cast that he was playing a younger version of Ed Harris’s character. However, Wood—like many amateur Westworld theorists playing along at home—unraveled some mysteries simply by continuously chewing over the possibilities. “I thought I was Arnold at one point,” she laughed. The entire panel agreed that Wood was the cleverest guesser on the set. “As in life, the guys are usually a few steps behind the women,” Marsden observed.
Though popular, Westworld has yet to completely dominate the pop cultural conversation the way HBO’s other big genre show, Game of Thrones, has. Off-season interest in Thrones has reached a fever pitch over the past few years, causing that show’s once-gregarious cast and creative team to go on the defensive. Though they’re still warm to fans, the Game of Thrones team (which unilaterally declines to share any details about future episodes at fan conventions and panels and won’t even let press view episodes in advance) has recently gone to war with those who specifically pursue spoilers, calling them “low-lifers”, “childish and annoying”, and “a–hole[s].” Most of these epithets are reserved for those extra-curious Thrones-heads who have snapped spy photos and videos from set.
This is a problem that Westworld, admittedly, has not had to deal with. The show was able to film its first long-in-the-works season in relative anonymity. The Nolans may be changing their tune this time next year. But Lisa Joy, especially, seemed pretty relaxed about the fact that internet sleuths unraveled the Season 1 twists of Westworld early. This show, so far, has decided to accept spoiler culture as part of the new TV normal.
There is, of course, another reason the Westworld team might be more sanguine about spoilers and speculation than Game of Thrones or even the The Walking Dead. Though the latter popular shows have leaned increasingly into “shocking” cliffhangers and major reveals that require months of obfuscation and secret-keeping in the off-season, they are not exactly “puzzle” shows. Westworld, however, draws heavily on classic Nolan film twists and the “mystery box” influence of its executive producer, J.J. Abrams, purposefully dropping clues for its viewers to follow. How can the Nolans, then, get mad when those clues lead to viewers cracking the case wide open?
The answer—at least publicly—is that they aren’t. Jonathan Nolan said he took those correct guesses as an indication that he had crafted a satisfying route to the reveal. “I’m not a big fan of the rug pull,” he explained. And while the Nolans said they would prefer if the viewers who guessed the ending had kept it to themselves rather than blogging about it (guilty), they also noted that the speculation and discussion only increased the popularity of their show.
Perhaps it’s unfair to compare the states of Game of Thrones and Westworld, as Lisa Joy did. One series is currently grappling with literal spoilers, while the other is still more in the realm of speculation. One has had to bear up under years of unrelenting scrutiny, while the other is only just beginning. But still, it’s refreshing to see a cast and crew keep mum about the future while still smilingly embracing all kinds of fans. Why fight a losing battle when the spoiler wars have already been won?
